Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro

Both parents' families were middle-class, but they sank into poverty after the October revolution of 1917.

He became interested in mathematics at the age of 10, struck, as he wrote in his short memoir, "by the charm and unusual beauty of negative numbers", which his father, a PhD in chemical engineering, showed him.

Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (Hebrew: איליה פיאטצקי-שפירו; Илья́ Ио́сифович Пяте́цкий-Шапи́ро; 30 March 1929 – 21 February 2009) was a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician.

During a career that spanned 60 years he made major contributions to applied science as well as pure mathematics.

In his last forty years his research focused on pure mathematics; in particular, analytic number theory, group representations and algebraic geometry.

His main contribution and impact was in the area of automorphic forms and L-functions.

For the last 30 years of his life he suffered from Parkinson's disease.

However, with the help of his wife Edith, he was able to continue to work and do mathematics at the highest level, even when he was barely able to walk and speak.

Piatetski-Shapiro was born in 1929 in Moscow, Soviet Union.

Both his father, Iosif Grigor'evich, and mother, Sofia Arkadievna, were from traditional Jewish families, which had become assimilated.

His father was from Berdichev, a small city in the Ukraine, with a largely Jewish population.

His mother was from Gomel, a similar small city in Belorussia.

In 1952, Piatetski-Shapiro won the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize for a Young Mathematician for work done while still an undergraduate at Moscow University.

His winning paper contained a solution to the problem of the French analyst Raphaël Salem on sets of uniqueness of trigonometric series.

The award was especially remarkable because of the atmosphere of strong anti-Semitism in Soviet Union at that time.

Despite the award, and a very strong recommendation by his mentor Alexander O. Gelfond, a professor of mathematics at Moscow University and an important Communist Party member (Gelfond’s father was a friend of Lenin), Piatetski-Shapiro’s application to graduate program at Moscow University was rejected.

He was ultimately admitted to the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, where he received his Ph.D. in 1954 under the direction of Alexander Buchstab.

His early work was in classical analytic number theory.

This includes his paper on what is now known as the Piatetski-Shapiro prime number theorem, which states that, for 1 ≤ c ≤ 12/11, the number of integers 1 ≤ n ≤ x for which the integer part of nc is prime is asymptotically x / c log x as x → ∞.

After leaving the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, he spent a year at the Steklov Institute, where he received the advanced Doctor of Sciences degree, also in 1954, under the direction of Igor Shafarevich.

His contact with Shafarevich, who was a professor at the Steklov Institute, broadened Piatetski-Shapiro's mathematical outlook and directed his attention to modern number theory and algebraic geometry.

This led, after a while, to the joint paper in which they proved a Torelli theorem for K3 surfaces.

Piatetski-Shapiro in 1958 was made a professor of mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Applied Mathematics, where he introduced Siegel domains.

By the 1960s, he was recognized as a star mathematician.

He was invited to attend 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm, but was not allowed to go by Soviet authorities (Shafarevich, also invited, presented his talk).

In 1965 he was appointed to an additional professorship at Moscow State University.

He conducted seminars for advanced students, among them Grigory Margulis (now at Yale) and David Kazhdan (now at Hebrew University).

In 1966, Piatetski-Shapiro was again invited to the ICM in Moscow where he presented a 1-hour lecture on Automorphic Functions and arithmetic groups (Автоморфные функции и арифметические группы).

Piatetski-Shapiro was not allowed to travel abroad to attend meetings or visit colleagues except for one short trip to Hungary.

The Soviet authorities insisted on one condition: become a party member, and then you can travel anywhere you want.

Ilya gave his famous answer: “The membership in the Communist Party will distract me from my work.”

During the span of his career Piatetski-Shapiro was influenced greatly by Israel Gelfand.

The aim of their collaboration was to introduce novel representation theory into classical modular forms and number theory.

Together with Graev, they wrote the book Automorphic Forms and Representations.

During the early 1970s, a growing number of Soviet Jews were permitted to emigrate to Israel.

The anti-Jewish behavior in the Soviet Union, however, was not enough to make Piatetski-Shapiro want to leave his country.

What shook him to the core was the difficulty of maintaining a Jewish identity and the enforced conformity to communism around him in the scientific community.

He didn’t wish this future for his son, sixteen at the time.

Piatetski-Shapiro lost his part-time position at mathematics department of Moscow State University in 1973, after he signed a letter asking Soviet authorities to release a dissident mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin from a mental institution.

Many other mathematicians who signed the letter (including Shafarevich) also lost their part-time positions.