David Kazhdan

David Kazhdan, born Dmitry Aleksandrovich Kazhdan, is a Soviet and Israeli mathematician known for work in representation theory, born in Moscow on 20 June 1946. He earned a doctorate under Alexandre Kirillov in 1969 and was a member of the school of mathematics of Israel Gelfand. He emigrated from the Soviet Union to take a position at Harvard University in 1975, changing his name from Dmitri to David and becoming an Orthodox Jew around that time. In 2002 he immigrated to Israel and is now a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as professor emeritus at Harvard. He is known for collaboration with Israel Gelfand, Victor Kac and George Lusztig on the Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture and with Grigory Margulis on the Kazhdan-Margulis theorem. He is a 1990 MacArthur Fellow and in 2012 received the Israel Prize for Mathematics and Computer Sciences. In 2013 he was critically injured in a bicycle accident in Jerusalem.