Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov (also spelled Mikhael Gromov or Michael Gromov; Russian: Михаи́л Леони́дович Гро́мов; born 23 December 1943), is a French–Russian mathematician known for important contributions in many different areas of mathematics. He is considered a geometer in a very broad sense of the word. In 2009 he was awarded the Abel Prize "for his revolutionary contributions to geometry".

Mikhail Gromov was born on 23 December 1943 in Boksitogorsk, Soviet Union. His father was Leonid Gromov and his mother was Lea Rabinovitz. Both his parents were pathologists. Gromov was born during World War II, and his mother, who worked as a medical doctor in the Soviet Army, had to distance herself from the front line in order to give birth to him.[4] When Gromov was nine years old,[5] his mother gave him the book Numbers and Figures, by Hans Rademacher and Otto Toeplitz, a book that piqued his curiosity and had a great influence on him.

Gromov studied for a doctorate (1973) in Leningrad, where he was a student of Vladimir Rokhlin. He is now a permanent member of IHÉS, and a Professor of Mathematics at New York University.

Prizes

• Prize of the Mathematical Society of Moscow (1971)
• Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (AMS) (1981)
• Prix Elie Cartan de l'Academie des Sciences de Paris (1984)
• Prix de l'Union des Assurances de Paris (1989)
• Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1993)
• Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research (AMS) (1997)
• Lobachevsky Medal (1997)
• Balzan Prize for Mathematics (1999)
• Kyoto Prize in Mathematical Sciences (2002)
• Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (2004)
• Bolyai Prize in 2005
• Abel Prize in 2009 “for his revolutionary contributions to geometry”