Edward Frenkel

In 2014 Frenkel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jointly with Boris Feigin, Frenkel constructed the free field realizations of affine Kac–Moody algebras (these are also known as Wakimoto modules), defined the quantum Drinfeld-Sokolov reduction, and described the center of the universal enveloping algebra of an affine Kac–Moody algebra. The last result, often referred to as Feigin–Frenkel isomorphism, has been used by Alexander Beilinson and Vladimir Drinfeld in their work on the geometric Langlands correspondence. Together with Nicolai Reshetikhin, Frenkel introduced deformations of W-algebras and q-characters of representations of quantum affine algebras.

In 2013 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to representation theory, conformal field theory, affine Lie algebras, and quantum field theory".

Frenkel's book Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality was published in October 2013. It was a New York Times bestseller, was named one of the Best Books of 2013 by Amazon and iBooks, and was the 2015 winner of the Euler Book Prize. As of February 2016, it has been published in 16 languages. Love and Math is 304 pages long in the English version.

Peter Woit, author of Not Even Wrong, wrote in a Sept 2013 blog post:

Frenkel has co-produced, co-directed (with Reine Graves) and played the lead in a short film Rites of Love and Math, a homage to the film Rite of Love and Death (also known as Yûkoku) by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. The film premiered in Paris in April, 2010 and was in the official competition of the Sitges International Film Festival in October, 2010. The screening of Rites of Love and Math in Berkeley on December 1, 2010 caused some controversy.

Frenkel was the first recipient of the Hermann Weyl Prize in 2002. Among his other awards are Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering and Chaire d'Excellence from Fondation Sciences mathématiques de Paris.

Edward Vladimirovich Frenkel (Russian: Эдуáрд Влади́мирович Фре́нкель , sometimes spelled Э́двард Фре́нкель; born May 2, 1968) is a Russian-American mathematician working in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a professor of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of the bestselling book Love and Math.

Edward Frenkel was born on May 2, 1968, in Kolomna, Russia, which was then part of the Soviet Union. His father is of Jewish descent and his mother is Russian. As a high school student he studied higher mathematics privately with Evgeny Evgenievich Petrov, although his initial interest was in quantum physics rather than mathematics. He was not admitted to Moscow State University because of discrimination against Jews and enrolled instead in the applied mathematics program at the Gubkin University of Oil and Gas. While a student there, he attended the seminar of Israel Gelfand and worked with Boris Feigin and Dmitry Fuchs. After receiving his degree in 1989, he was first invited to Harvard University as a visiting professor, and a year later he enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1991, after one year of study, under the direction of Boris Feigin and Joseph Bernstein. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1991 to 1994, and served as an associate professor at Harvard from 1994 to 1997. He has been a professor of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, since 1997.