Hillel Furstenberg - The Abel Prize interview 2020

00:00 Congratulations
00:30 Furstenberg tells us about his childhood and his love for mathematics
03:20 Enjoying problem-solving challenges
05:44 Being an undergraduate student at Yeshiva College and his paper "on the infinitude of primes"
08:27 PhD thesis at Princeton University proving the equidistribution theorem by using dynamical systems
12:38 Introducing the ergodic theorem
13:51 An alternative way of looking at it
15:26 Diophantine Problem and dynamic system for other number theoretic problems
17:02 Example of a skew product
19:16 Proving the Szemerédi theorem
20:48 Isometric extension and structure theorem for distal systems
27:05 Is there a structure theorem for ergodic systems?
28:35 Becoming aware of the Szemerédi theorem and the origins of the proof
33:50 The "accidental revelations" of mathematics
38:56 How random walks related to the boundary concept
44:40 G. Margulis gives Furstenberg credit and Furstenberg gives Donsker credit
47:15 Inspiration from Gelfand's work
51:46 The disjointness in dynamical systems
55:32 The process of discovery: knowledge vs. imagination
57:17 how to recognize whether systems are regular or random
59:44 Furstenberg's book from 2014 and its ramifications
1:03:03 Furstenberg's favorite work and proving fractals
1:06:41 Thank you for the interview

Read the full interview in Notices of the American Mathematical Society:

Hillel Furstenberg is interviewed by the two mathematicians Christian Skau and Bjørn Ian Dundas.

[pmcate]

I'm inspired by these people, but at the same time frustrated and jealous. These people had it from the beginning. Yeah they had to work for it, but not as hard as most other people.