Turaev, V. G. 1954-

Vladimir Georgievich Turaev (Владимир Георгиевич Тураев, born in 1954) is a Russian mathematician, specializing in topology. Turaev received in 1979 from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics his Candidate of Sciences degree (PhD) under Oleg Viro. Turaev was a professor at the University of Strasbourg and then became a professor at Indiana University. In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Turaev's research deals with low-dimensional topology, quantum topology, and knot theory and their interconnections with quantum field theory. In 1991, Reshetikhin and Turaev published a mathematical construction of new topological invariants of compact oriented 3-manifolds and framed links in these manifolds, corresponding to a mathematical implementation of ideas in quantum field theory published by Witten; the invariants are now called Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev (or Reshetikhin-Turaev) invariants. In 1992, Turaev and Viro introduced a new family of invariants for 3-manifolds by using state sums computed on triangulations of manifolds; these invariants are now called Turaev-Viro invariants. In 1990, Turaev was an Invited Speaker with talk State sum models in low dimensional topology at the ICM in Kyōto. In 2016, he shared, with Alexis Virelizier, the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize for their monograph Monoidal categories and topological field theory.