Viktor Ginzburg, professor and chair of mathematics at UC Santa Cruz, is among 52 mathematical scientists from around the world who have been named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2020.
The designation as AMS Fellow honors members of the society who have made outstanding contributions to mathematics and to the profession. Ginzburg was recognized "for contributions to Hamiltonian dynamical systems and symplectic topology and in particular studies into the existence and non-existence of periodic orbits."
Symplectic geometry is the geometry underlying classical mechanics and is also important to quantum mechanics and low-dimensional topology. Hamiltonian systems are the natural dynamical systems arising in symplectic geometry. Ginzburg's recent work has focused on the problem of existence of periodic orbits of Hamiltonian systems and related questions. His research has deepened understanding of connections between symplectic topology and Hamiltonian dynamics.
Ginzburg earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at UC Berkeley and joined the UCSC faculty in 1996. He received the Concours Annuel Prize from the Royal Academy of Belgium in 2016.
