Education
He received his Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1980 with a dissertation on the "Orbital Theory for Affine Lie Algebras".
mathematician university professor
He received his Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University in 1980 with a dissertation on the "Orbital Theory for Affine Lie Algebras".
Frenkel emigrated to the United States in 1979. He held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study and MSRI, and a tenured professorship at Rutgers University, before taking his current job of tenured professor at Yale University. In collaboration with James Lepowsky and Arne Meurman, he constructed the monster vertex algebra, a vertex algebra which provides a representation of the monster group.
He continued to develop the idea with his student Mikhail Khovanov, and their collaboration ultimately led to the discovery of Khovanov homology, a refinement of the Jones polynomial, in 2002.
A detailed description of Igor Frenkel"s research over the years can be found in "Perspectives in Representation Theory".
Around 1990, as a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Frenkel worked on the mathematical theory of knots, hoping to develop a theory in which the knot would be seen as a physical object.