Dan-Virgil Voiculescu

Dan-Virgil Voiculescu (Romanian pronunciation: [dan virˈd͡ʒil vojkuˈlesku]; born 14 June 1949) is a Romanian professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked in single operator theory, operator K-theory and von Neumann algebras. More recently, he developed free probability theory.

Dan-Virgil Voiculescu
(photo by George Bergman)
Born	(1949-06-14) 14 June 1949 (age 76) Bucharest, Romania
Nationality	Romanian
Alma mater	University of Bucharest
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	Ciprian Foias
Doctoral students	Sorin Popa

Education and career

Voiculescu studied at the University of Bucharest, receiving his PhD in 1977 under the direction of Ciprian Foias.^[1] He was an assistant at the University of Bucharest (1972–1973), a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy (1973–1975), and a researcher at INCREST (1975–1986). He came to Berkeley in 1986 for the International Congress of Mathematicians, and stayed on as visiting professor. Voiculescu was appointed professor at Berkeley in 1987.

Awards and honors

He received the 2004 NAS Award in Mathematics from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for “the theory of free probability, in particular, using random matrices and a new concept of entropy to solve several hitherto intractable problems in von Neumann algebras.”^[2]

Voiculescu was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[3]