Victor Anatolyevich Vassiliev (also spelled Vasilyev; Russian: Виктор Анатольевич Васильев; born April 10, 1956) is a Soviet and Russian mathematician.
Biography
Vassiliev studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics at Lomonosov University in Moscow until 1981. He defended his Candidate of Sciences thesis under Vladimir Arnold in 1982 and received the title of Doctor of Sciences in 1992. He has held research positions at several institutes, including the Documents and Archives Research Institute, the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, and the Research Institute for System Studies. Since 1991, he has been a professor at the Mathematics College of the Independent Moscow University. Since 1997, he has been a Principal Researcher in the Department of Geometry and Topology at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow. Since 2009, he has been a professor and department chair at the Higher School of Economics — Faculty of Mathematics, HSE. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris VII and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2022, he emigrated to Israel following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Mathematical Contributions
Vassiliev is best known for his discovery of the Vassiliev invariants in knot theory (also known as finite type invariants), which subsume many previously discovered polynomial knot invariants such as the Jones polynomial. His research spans singularity theory, topology, computational complexity theory, integral geometry, symplectic geometry, partial differential equations (geometry of wavefronts), complex analysis, combinatorics, and Picard–Lefschetz theory.
Awards and Honors
- Moscow Mathematical Society Award (1986)
- Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Science (1997)
- Full member of the Russian Academy of Science (2003)
- Invited plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich (1994)
- Vice-chief editor of the journal Functional Analysis and its Applications
- President of the Moscow Mathematical Society
