Edward Frenkel

Frenkel grew up in Kolomna near Moscow; his parents were engineers. At sixteen he applied to Moscow State University, excelled in the written exams but was grilled for hours in the oral exam, which he saw as targeting Jewish students, withdrew, and went to the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas instead.⁠[1]

He later climbed the fence to attend lectures at Moscow State University.⁠[2]

He finished his undergraduate studies at the institute, nicknamed “Kerosinka,” where some of his research was smuggled abroad; in 1989 he emigrated and went straight to a visiting position at HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

After serving on the Harvard faculty, he joined the mathematics department of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997.⁠[4]

He co-wrote Vertex Algebras and Algebraic Curves with David Ben-Zvi (American Mathematical Society, 2001) and wrote Langlands Correspondence for Loop Groups (Cambridge University Press, 2007); in 2008 he published “Geometric Endoscopy and Mirror Symmetry” with Edward Witten, and in 2010 a paper with Robert Langlands and Ngô Bao Châu.⁠[5]

On a 2009 Paris sabbatical he and French filmmaker Reine Graves wrote, directed and starred in the 26-minute film Rites of Love and Math, an homage to Yukio Mishima’s Yukoku; it premiered in Paris in April 2010.⁠[6]

Before its North American premiere in Berkeley in December 2010, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute withdrew its sponsorship after critics called the trailer offensive to women; the screening went ahead.⁠[6]

On September 30, 2013, he wrote in SlateSlate AutoSlate Auto is a U.S. electric vehicle company established in 2022 that is developing a customizable all-electric pickup with a starting price of $24,950, to be assembled in Indiana.Open the full entry that alleged National Security Agency efforts to plant backdoors in cryptosystems built on mathematical objects such as elliptic curves set a dangerous precedent of tampering with mathematics and left everyone more vulnerable to attack.⁠[7]

In October 2013 he published Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality, interweaving autobiography with an introduction to the Langlands Program; he describes how, as a teenager, a mathematician friend of the family turned him from hating math to pursuing theory. Publishers Weekly found the math sometimes heavy going but his gusto engaging.⁠[8]

On March 2, 2014, he wrote in the Los Angeles Times that America’s school math curriculum is more than 1,000 years old, like teaching students to paint a fence without showing them the masters, and urged introducing concepts such as symmetry groups early.⁠[9]

In May 2014 he and his Berkeley colleague Daniel Tataru were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.⁠[10]

Anthony W. Knapp praised how Frenkel uses his personal story to show readers the beauty of mathematics; the book also recounts the 1990 public unmasking of Moscow State University’s rector over whitewashed discriminatory admissions.⁠[3]

Love and Math won the 2015 Euler Book Prize and was a New York Times bestseller; it has appeared in 20 languages, including an Arabic edition in January 2018, a Czech edition in April 2020 and a traditional Chinese edition in June 2025.⁠[11]

Edward Rothstein wrote in Inference that the book’s autobiographical passages are charming but its mathematics soon becomes too abstract for readers without background.⁠[1]

With Pavel Etingof and David Kazhdan he published a series of papers opening a new chapter of the Langlands Program, the “analytic Langlands correspondence”; “A general framework for the analytic Langlands correspondence” appeared as an arXiv preprint in March 2021.⁠[4]

In April 2023 he appeared on episode 370 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, introduced as working on the interface of mathematics and quantum physics, discussing mathematics in the Soviet Union, the nature of reality, complex numbers, AI, Eric WeinsteinEric WeinsteinEric Weinstein is an American mathematician, investor and podcast host with a Harvard PhD in mathematics who has served as managing director of Thiel Capital and hosted the podcast The Portal; his proposed physics unification theory, Geometric Unity, and his coinage “Intellectual Dark Web” have both drawn wide discussion and controversy.Open the full entry, the Langlands Program, Edward Witten, string theory, Fermat’s Last Theorem and antisemitism, among other topics.⁠[12]

On May 28, 2025, as the traditional Chinese edition of Love and Math launched in Taiwan, he said that mathematics increasingly affects people through social media, cryptocurrencies and AI systems and that he is more and more concerned about misuse of mathematical tools; “Math is not about answers,” he said, but about the process of discovery, with computers as tools.⁠[13]

He is a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, has won the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics and has published more than 100 scholarly articles; he launched the YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry series “AfterMath” and performs electronic music as “DJ Moonstein.”⁠[14]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.edwardfrenkel.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

X: Public account: https://x.com/edfrenkel (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/edfrenkel (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edfrenkel/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]

Harvard University: Official website: https://www.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]

University of California, Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]