David Kazhdan: The Boy Who Phoned Gelfand and Never Stopped Calling
At thirteen, David Kazhdan picked up a telephone in Moscow and asked one of the greatest mathematicians alive to teach him. Israel Gelfand said yes. Within a year the boy had co-written a research paper with Gelfand's sixteen-year-old son. On 1 October 2026, more than sixty years later, the Wolf Foundation named him a laureate in mathematics, alongside his fellow Moscow-born mathematician Joseph Bernstein.
A Premature Child in a Moscow Apartment
He was born Dmitry Aleksandrovich Kazhdan on 20 June 1946, so early that nobody expected him to survive. His father, Alexander Kazhdan, was a historian of the Byzantine Empire; his mother, Rimma Ivjanskaja, kept the household together. It was a Jewish family, but an atheist one, in a country where being Jewish was a fact on your papers rather than a faith in your home. David was the only child.
School bored him. At eleven he tried to bargain his way out of it, offering to study chess instead. His parents let him try for six months, then pushed him toward something more serious. He chose mathematics and spent a year learning it with his grandfather.
The Telephone Call
In a Moscow bookstore he met the mathematician Naum Vilenkin, who sent him to Gelfand's legendary seminar. At thirteen he phoned Gelfand himself and asked for lessons alongside Gelfand's son Sergei. At fourteen he and Sergei published a paper on integral equations. The lesson that stayed with him for life was Gelfand's conviction that mathematics is one connected whole, not a pile of separate subjects.
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Take the IQ test →He entered Moscow State University at seventeen, studied under Alexandre Kirillov, earned his diploma in 1967 and his doctorate in 1969. In 1966 the International Congress of Mathematicians came to Moscow and, for a few days, the wall around Soviet mathematics had a door in it. He met Michael Atiyah and Harish-Chandra there. Eight years later, when the congress was held in Vancouver, he was not allowed to go.
A Theorem at Twenty-Two, and a Return to Judaism
In 1968 he and Grigory Margulis proved a conjecture of the Norwegian mathematician Atle Selberg about discrete groups. The Swiss-born mathematician Armand Borel, one of the giants of the field, called the argument basically elementary but very ingenious. Kazhdan was twenty-two.
Around then something else began. A friend's conversion to Christianity made him ask what his own tradition meant. He taught himself Hebrew, worked through Aramaic texts and gave talks at Moscow's central synagogue. He became Orthodox, and Dmitry became David. Soviet limits on religious life were one of the reasons he decided to leave.
Harvard, Soloveitchik and a Daily Page of Talmud
In 1975 Harvard offered him a visiting professorship and he emigrated; he was a full professor by 1977. In Brookline he attended the Talmud lessons of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the most influential Orthodox thinkers of the century, and he went on studying Bible, Talmud and Maimonides every day with his teacher Itzhak David Goldberg. He still starts his mornings with religious study before he opens a mathematics paper.
His students at Harvard included Vladimir Voevodsky, who later won the Fields Medal. In 2002 Kazhdan moved to the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He learned modern Hebrew at fifty-five. In 2011 he climbed Kilimanjaro. On 6 October 2013 a truck hit him during a forty-four-mile bicycle ride with his son Eli in Jerusalem; he recovered. He and his wife, the mathematician Helena Slobodkin, have four children.
What He Found
Kazhdan's Property (T) is a rigidity condition on groups, and it turned out to be the ingredient for building expander graphs, the networks that connect many points with few links and are now used in computer science and cryptography. With George Lusztig he formulated the Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture and the polynomials that carry their names, a bridge between the algebra of symmetry and the geometry of curved spaces. Those ideas fed directly into the Wolf Prize citation: foundational work in representation theory, automorphic forms and algebraic geometry, and the creation of geometric representation theory.
The Honors
He received a MacArthur Fellowship and election to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1990, the Rothschild Prize in 2010, the Israel Prize in 2012, the EMET Prize in 2016 and the Shaw Prize in 2020, shared with Alexander Beilinson. The Wolf Prize ceremony is planned for the Knesset in June 2027.
Why David Kazhdan Is Called a Genius
Most mathematicians are known for a theorem. Kazhdan is known for habits of thought that other mathematicians now use without noticing: see the group, see the geometry, and trust that the two are one thing. He proved a famous conjecture at twenty-two, then spent six decades turning that way of seeing into a language an entire field speaks. And he did it as an observant Jew who studies a page of Talmud before breakfast, which may be the clearest proof that he never believed the world had to be divided into separate subjects.
Achievements
- Wolf Prize in Mathematics, 2026
- Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences, 2020, shared with Alexander Beilinson
- Israel Prize, 2012
- Property (T) and the Kazhdan-Margulis theorem (1968)
- Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture and polynomials, with George Lusztig
- Advisor of Vladimir Voevodsky at Harvard
