Name Marina Ratner Role Professor of mathematics | Awards Ostrowski Prize Academic advisor Yakov Sinai | |
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Education Moscow State University (1969) | ||
6 prof marina ratner
Marina Evseevna Ratner (Russian: Мари́на Евсе́евна Ра́тнер; October 30, 1938 – July 7, 2017) was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who worked in ergodic theory. Around 1990, she proved a group of major theorems concerning unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, known as Ratner's theorems. Ratner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, awarded the Ostrowski Prize in 1993 and elected to the National Academy of Sciences the same year. In 1994, she was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences.
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Biographical information
Born in Moscow, Russian SFSR to a Jewish family, her father was a plant physiologist and mother, a chemist. Ratner's mother was fired from work in the 1940s for writing to her mother in Israel, then considered an enemy of the Soviet state. Ratner gained an interest in mathematics in her fifth grade. She then studied at the Moscow State University in 1956 where she was inspired by A.N. Kolmogorov and his group. Her graduate studies were under Yakov G. Sinai, also a student of Kolmogorov. She emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1971 after obtaining a Ph.D. to Israel and taught at the Hebrew University 1971–1975. She began to work with Rufus Bowen at Berkeley and later emigrated to the United States and became a professor of mathematics at Berkeley. Her work included proofs of conjectures dealing with unipotent flows on quotients of Lie groups made by S. G. Dani and M. S. Raghunathan.