Ilya Shkredov joins the faculty for the Department of Mathematics at Purdue University
11-22-2024
The Department of Mathematics at Purdue University welcomes a new faculty member, Ilya Shkredov, who began in the spring of 2024. He is currently teaching “An introduction to the sum-product phenomenon,” and taught “Introduction to additive combinatorics” last semester. He is also a corresponding member of Russian Academy of Sciences. His research area spans various areas of number theory.
“My main areas of expertise are additive combinatorics, number theory and combinatorial ergodic theory,” he says. “I mainly study the combinatorial aspects of number theory, analysis, and dynamical systems. Combinatorics in general is the study of very difficult systems with complicated behavior, but it tries to find some facts that hold in all circumstances. For example, if I take a positive proportion P of numbers among 1,2,…,n (for large n), then P can be absolutely arbitrary, of course, but anyway it is known that any such P must contain some configurations, e.g., arithmetic progressions of length three. Another example, suppose we have a (incompressible) liquid and there are several stirrers that mix the liquid. In general, the movement of these stirrers can be quite complicated, but in any there is a fact that if I take a typical molecule, it will return to its neighborhood. Both mentioned facts have a combinatorial nature (and proofs) and, strangely enough, are manifestations of the same deep principle.”
He graduated from Kolmogorov Boarding School (AESC MSU) in 1997, gained his PhD at Moscow State University in 2005, the second Russian scientific degree (habilitation) at Saint Petersburg State University in 2009, and was then elected as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2016. He received two postdocs IAS, Princeton, 2007 and MSRI, Berkeley, 2008. He was then a consultant in Microsoft Research several years after.
“I was Chief Scientific Researcher at the Steklov Mathematical Institute (worked in the period 2010-2023), Leading Research at IITP ((worked in the period 2009-2022), Full professor at Moscow State University (worked in the period 2006-2022) and Full professor at MIPT (worked in the period 2015-2022),” he says. “I held a visiting professorship at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, Bonn, Mathematisches Institut, Göttingen, and Mathematical Research Institute, Sydney.”
Shkredov is from a small Russian military town near Moscow. He credits his participation in the Olympiad movement (mainly in chemistry, but also in mathematics and physics) for allowing him to graduate from the prestigious Kolmogorov Boarding School which allowed him to enter Moscow State University. “It was the best university in Russia at that time,” he says. “Here I met serious scientists and found my way in mathematics.”
He describes Purdue as a perfect university and a nice place to live. “I feel comfortable here both in general and mathematically. We have a nice research group and colleagues at the institution,” he says. When not teaching and researching Mathematics, he enjoys poetry. “I am an admirer of the poetry of Joseph Brodsky,” he says.