Exclusive Interview with Alex Eskin: Insights into Rational Billiards & Geometric Group Theory 🎯

Alex Eskin's research focuses on rational billiards and geometric group theory. Eskin earned his doctorate from Princeton University in 1993, under the supervision of Peter Sarnak. He has been a professor at the University of Chicago since 1999.
He gave invited talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998, and in Hyderabad in 2010. For his contribution to joint work with David Fisher and Kevin Whyte establishing the quasi-isometric rigidity of solvable groups, Eskin was awarded the 2007 Clay Research Award. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In April 2015, Eskin was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He won the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in mathematics for his classification of P-invariant and stationary measures for the moduli of translation surfaces, in joint work with Maryam Mirzakhani.

http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~eskin/

Interview and editing: Stéphanie Vareilles, CIRM
Camera operator: Guillaume Hennenfent, Le Chromophore

Interview conducted on September 20, 2022
Published on November 8, 2022