Victor Kolyvagin is the first to hold the Mina Rees Chair in Mathematics, named for The Graduate Center's first president, who was a distinguished mathematician. He is famous for a series of papers produced over several years and culminating in one on "Euler Systems," which is considered an original, fundamental breakthrough, and which played an important role in Andrew Wiles's path to his famous proof of Fermat's last theorem. Among the most significant discoveries in number theory in the past quarter century, his discovery of Euler Systems continues to be used in the ongoing development of the field and has led to breakthroughs in what are known to mathematicians as the Birch and Swinnerton Dyer conjecture for elliptical curves and Iwasawa's conjecture for cyclotomic fields, along with other significant applications. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Moscow State University, worked at the Steclov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, and in 1990 received the USSR Academy of Science's Chebyshev Prize. Most recently he was J.J. Sylvester Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.

Photo: John Hopkins University