Leonard Gross

Yang–Mills theory has been another focus of Gross's works. Since 2013, Gross and Nelia Charalambous have made a deep study of the Yang–Mills heat equation and related questions.

Gross was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1974–1975. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in the inaugural class of 2013. He was recipient of the Humboldt Prize in 1996.

Gross was one of the initiators of the study of logarithmic Sobolev inequalities, which he discovered in 1967 for his work in constructive quantum field theory and published later in two foundational papers established these inequalities for the Bosonic and Fermionic cases. The inequalities were named by Gross, who established the inequalities in dimension-independent form, a key feature especially in the context of applications to infinite-dimensional settings such as for quantum field theories. Gross's logarithmic Sobolev inequalities proved to be of great significance well beyond their original intended scope of application, for example in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture by Grigori Perelman.

Gross's earliest mathematical works were on integration and harmonic analysis on infinite-dimensional spaces. These ideas, and especially the need for a structure within which potential theory in infinite dimensions could be studied, culminated in Gross's construction of abstract Wiener spaces in 1965. This structure has since become a standard framework for infinite-dimensional analysis.

Gross taught at Yale University and was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship in 1959. He joined the faculty of the mathematics department of Cornell University in 1960. Gross was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1959 and in 1983 and has held other visiting positions. He has supervised 35 doctoral students.

Leonard Gross graduated from James Madison High School in December 1948. He was awarded an Emil Schweinberg scholarship that enabled him to attend college. He studied at City College of New York for one term and then studied electrical engineering at Cooper Union for two years. He then transferred to the University of Chicago, where he obtained a master's degree in physics and mathematics (1954) and a Ph.D. in mathematics (1958).

Leonard Gross (born February 24, 1931) is an American mathematician and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Cornell University.