Mathematicians in U.S., Israel share Abel Prize

March 18 (UPI) -- Two professors who pioneered ways to use randomness to solve important questions about numbers won Norway's Abel Prize, the mathematics committee announced Wednesday.

The recipients -- Hillel Furstenberg from the Hebew University of Jerusalem and Gregory Margulis from Yale University -- will share the $834,000 award. Both are retired.

"The works of Furstenberg and Margulis have demonstrated the effectiveness of crossing boundaries between separate mathematical disciplines and brought down the traditional wall between pure and applied mathematics," Abel committee Chairman Hans Munthe-Kaas said.

He said the two men used probabilistic methods and a technique called random walks to solve mathematical problems. Their work has shed light on the existence of long arithmetic progressions of prime numbers, the structure of lattices in Lie groups, and the construction of expander graphs with applications to communication technology and computer science.

Furstenberg, 84, was born in Berlin in 1935 and his family fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1939. He had a career in mathematics at multiple U.S. universities before leaving to work in Jerusalem.

Margulis, a 74-year-old Russian native, won the Fields Medal for his work in mathematics in 1978. he worked at the Institute for Problems in Information Transmission in Russia before going to the United States to work for Yale in 1991. He's also won the Lobachevsky and Wolf prizes during his career.

The Abel Prize, which is awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, will not be presented in a formal ceremony this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.