Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro

Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro was a Soviet-Israeli mathematician, born in Moscow on 30 March 1929 to assimilated Jewish families, whose career spanned 60 years and who made major contributions to applied science as well as pure mathematics. In his last forty years his research focused on analytic number theory, group representations and algebraic geometry, and his main contribution was in the area of automorphic forms and L-functions. In 1965 he was appointed to an additional professorship at Moscow State University. After the Soviet authorities refused him an exit visa for years, he was welcomed in Israel and accepted a professorship at Tel Aviv University, and from 1977 he divided his time between Tel Aviv University and Yale University, directing doctoral dissertations in both places. He received the Israel Prize for mathematics in 1981 and the Wolf Prize for Mathematics in 1990. For the last 30 years of his life he suffered from Parkinson disease, and with the help of his wife Edith he continued to do mathematics at the highest level until his death on 21 February 2009.