BERNSTEIN, JOSEPH

BERNSTEIN, JOSEPH (1945–), Israeli mathematician. Bernstein was born in Moscow. He received a M.Sc. in mathematics in 1968 and his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Moscow. He left the Soviet Union in 1981, teaching at the University of Maryland before joining Harvard University's Department of Mathematics, where he spent 10 years (1983–93). In 1993 he immigrated to Israel and joined Tel Aviv University, where he is became a professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences. Bernstein's fields of interest include algebraic geometry, representation theory, number theory, and automorphic forms. From the very beginning of his academic career in the early 1970s, his research was unique and his impact profound. First with his teachers, and later with his students and independently, Bernstein wrote on a broad spectrum of mathematical areas, including representation theory of Lie algebras and Lie groups, theory of D-modules, representation theory of p-adic groups, and automorphic forms, to mention only a few. The concepts incorporated in his numerous papers have become cornerstones of modern-day mathematics theory, and his classic article on the localization of D-modules, written jointly with A. Beilinson in 1981, remains one of the most widely cited articles in mathematics today. Bernstein was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2002 and to the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) in 2004. He was awarded the Israel Prize in mathematics in 2004. (Ruth Rossing (2nd ed.)