He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978, but was not permitted to travel to Helsinki to accept it in person, allegedly due to antisemitism against Jewish mathematicians in the Soviet Union.[4] His position improved, and in 1979 he visited Bonn, and was later able to travel freely, though he still worked in the Institute of Problems of Information Transmission, a research institute rather than a university. In 1991, Margulis accepted a professorial position at Yale University.
In 2020, Margulis received the Abel Prize jointly with Hillel Furstenberg "For pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics."[7]
Mathematical contributions
Margulis's early work dealt with Kazhdan's property (T) and the questions of rigidity and arithmeticity of lattices in semisimple algebraic groups of higher rank over a local field. It had been known since the 1950s (Borel, Harish-Chandra) that a certain simple-minded way of constructing subgroups of semisimple Lie groups produces examples of lattices, called arithmetic lattices. It is analogous to considering the subgroup SL(n,Z) of the realspecial linear groupSL(n,R) that consists of matrices with integer entries. Margulis proved that under suitable assumptions on G (no compact factors and split rank greater or equal than two), any (irreducible) lattice Γ in it is arithmetic, i.e. can be obtained in this way. Thus Γ is commensurable with the subgroup G(Z) of G, i.e. they agree on subgroups of finite index in both. Unlike general lattices, which are defined by their properties, arithmetic lattices are defined by a construction. Therefore, these results of Margulis pave a way for classification of lattices. Arithmeticity turned out to be closely related to another remarkable property of lattices discovered by Margulis. Superrigidity for a lattice Γ in G roughly means that any homomorphism of Γ into the group of real invertible n × n matrices extends to the whole G. The name derives from the following variant:
If G and G' are semisimple algebraic groups over a local field without compact factors and whose split rank is at least two and Γ and Γ are irreducible lattices in them, then any homomorphism f: Γ → Γ between the lattices agrees on a finite index subgroup of Γ with a homomorphism between the algebraic groups themselves.
(The case when f is an isomorphism is known as the strong rigidity.) While certain rigidity phenomena had already been known, the approach of Margulis was at the same time novel, powerful, and very elegant.
In 1986, Margulis gave a complete resolution of the Oppenheim conjecture on quadratic forms and diophantine approximation. This was a question that had been open for half a century, on which considerable progress had been made by the Hardy–Littlewood circle method; but to reduce the number of variables to the point of getting the best-possible results, the more structural methods from group theory proved decisive. He has formulated a further program of research in the same direction, that includes the Littlewood conjecture.
On some aspects of the theory of Anosov systems. With a survey by Richard Sharp: Periodic orbits of hyperbolic flows. Translated from the Russian by Valentina Vladimirovna Szulikowska. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2004. vi+139 pp. ISBN3-540-40121-0MR2035655[9]
Lectures
Oppenheim conjecture. Fields Medallists' lectures, 272–327, World Sci. Ser. 20th Century Math., 5, World Sci. Publ., River Edge, NJ, 1997 MR1622909
Dynamical and ergodic properties of subgroup actions on homogeneous spaces with applications to number theory. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. I, II (Kyoto, 1990), 193–215, Math. Soc. Japan, Tokyo, 1991 MR1159213
Papers
Explicit group-theoretic constructions of combinatorial schemes and their applications in the construction of expanders and concentrators. (Russian) Problemy Peredachi Informatsii 24 (1988), no. 1, 51–60; translation in Problems Inform. Transmission 24 (1988), no. 1, 39–46
Arithmeticity of the irreducible lattices in the semisimple groups of rank greater than 1, Invent. Math. 76 (1984), no. 1, 93–120 MR0739627
Some remarks on invariant means, Monatsh. Math. 90 (1980), no. 3, 233–235 MR0596890
Arithmeticity of nonuniform lattices in weakly noncompact groups. (Russian) Funkcional. Anal. i Prilozen. 9 (1975), no. 1, 35–44