Svetlana Jitomirskaya
University of California, Berkeley
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Primary Section: 32, Applied Mathematical Sciences Secondary Section: 11, Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2022)
Photo Credit: Victor Kleptsyn |
Biosketch
Svetlana Jitomirskaya holds the inaugural Elaine M. Hubbard Chair at Georgia Institute of Technology and is a Distinguished Professor of mathematics at UC Irvine, She received the BS/MS equivalent in 1987, and PhD in 1991, all in mathematics, from Moscow State University. Other than spending about half a year in 1996 visiting Barry Simon at California Institute of Technology, she has been associated with UC Irvine from 1991, when she started there as a part-time lecturer, to 2022, when she accepted a position at Georgia Institute of Technology. She was elected the vice president of the International Association of Mathematical Physics (IAMP), 2012-14, a Council member at large of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), 2022-25, and is a board member of the Association for Mathematical Research (AMR). She is the recipient of Sloan (1996) and Simons Foundation (2014 and 2020) Fellowships, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2018. She has won the American Mathematical Society Satter Prize in 2005, the American Physical Society & American Institute of Physics Dannie Heineman Prize in mathematical physics in 2020, and the inaugural Ladyzhenskaya Prize in mathematical physics in 2022. She was an invited speaker at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), and a plenary speaker at the 2022 ICM, She was elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Research Interests
Jitomirskaya's main interests lie in the spectral theory of Schrodinger operators, and related quantum and classical dynamical systems. She is particularly interested in the ergodic operators whose theory has been very actively developed in the last 30+ years, unveiling many highly unusual spectral/dynamical phenomena, and leading to the introduction of many novel concepts. This mathematical topic stems from and is highly influenced by the physics discoveries such as Anderson localization and transitions, quantum Hall effect, quasicrystals, graphene, topological insulators, and moire materials, and, remarkably, some of the purely mathematical discoveries, have also been influencing the related physics.
Jitomirskaya's main accomplishments are in the area of quasiperiodic operators, where she is best known for developing the first nonperturbative methods of study of small denominators, that have influenced the future development of this field. She has also been involved, by herself and with collaborators, in solution of several long-standing problems related to the almost Mathieu operators, also known as the Harper’s model. The remarkably sharp arithmetic sensitivity of various spectral phenomena in the area of quasiperiodic operators leads to the related problems having a strong number analytic flavor. The field, strongly connected with dynamical systems and probability, also requires the use of deep harmonic and functional analysis, as well as some algebraic geometry tools.
