Gregory V. Chudnovsky

Mathematician Class of June 1981
location icon Location
New York, New York
age iconAge
29 at time of award

About Gregory's Work

Gregory Chudnovsky has made original contributions in a wide range of mathematical fields, particularly in number theory.

Chudnovsky emigrated to the United States in 1978 to escape religious persecution in the Soviet Union.  He works on problems of diophantine geometry and transcendence theory, high-performance computing and computing architecture, and mathematical physics and its applications.  With his brother, David, Chudnovsky gained notoriety for calculating the number pi beyond two billion decimal places using a home-built supercomputer.  Statistical analyses of decimal expansions such as this provide fundamental insights into the properties of irrational numbers and number theory.

biography

He is the author and editor of several books including Contributions to the Theory of Transcendental Numbers (1984) and The Riemann Problem (1982), A. D. Sakharov: Collected Scientific Works (1982), and Classical and Quantum Models and Arithmetic Problems (1984).  He was a research fellow at Kiev State University (1974-1976), Maitre de Conference at Paris University (1977-1978), and a senior research scientist in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University (1978-1996).  Since 1996, he has been Industry Professor and co-director of the Institute for Mathematics and Advanced Supercomputing at Polytechnic University.

Chudnovsky received a diploma (1974) in mathematics from Kiev State University and a Ph.D. (1975) from the Institute of Mathematics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev.

Last updated January 1, 2005.

Published on June 1, 1981

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