Joseph Bernstein

Joseph Bernstein was born in 1945 in Moscow

Joseph Bernstein was born in Moscow on 18 April 1945. His parents, Naum and Sarah, were engineers, and his father specialized in film equipment. He won a gold medal at the 1962 International Mathematical Olympiad.

He studied mathematics at Moscow State University. He earned a master's degree there in 1968 and a doctorate in 1972 under Israel Gelfand. From 1971 to 1978 he did research in a university lab for mathematical methods in biology.

His papers from 1970 laid a basis for the theory of D-modules. With Gelfand and others he introduced ideas still used in representation theory, and with Alexander Beilinson he solved a conjecture of Kazhdan and Lusztig. In the late 1970s he taught at the Jewish People's University.

In 1981 he left Moscow for the United States, citing growing antisemitism, and was a visiting professor at the University of Maryland. He was a professor at Harvard from 1983 to 1993. In 1993 he moved to Israel and joined Tel Aviv University, becoming emeritus in 2014.

He received the Israel Prize in 2004, the EMET Prize in 2016 and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2026. He is married to Tamara and has two sons and a daughter.