Yuri Manin

Yuri Ivanovich Manin (Russian: Ю́рий Ива́нович Ма́нин; 16 February 1937 – 7 January 2023) was a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical logic to theoretical physics.

Manin was born on 16 February 1937 in Simferopol, Crimean ASSR, Soviet Union.

He received a doctorate in 1960 at the Steklov Mathematics Institute as a student of Igor Shafarevich. He became a professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn, where he was director from 1992 to 2005 and then director emeritus. He was also a Trustee Chair Professor at Northwestern University from 2002 to 2011.

He had over the years more than 50 doctoral students, including Vladimir Berkovich, Mariusz Wodzicki, Alexander Beilinson, Ivan Cherednik, Alexei Skorobogatov, Vladimir Drinfeld, Mikhail Kapranov, Vyacheslav Shokurov, Ralph Kaufmann, Victor Kolyvagin, Alexander L. Rosenberg, Alexander A. Voronov, and Hà Huy Khoái.

Manin died on 7 January 2023 in Bonn.

Manin's early work included papers on the arithmetic and formal groups of abelian varieties, the Mordell conjecture in the function field case, and algebraic differential equations. The Gauss–Manin connection is a basic ingredient of the study of cohomology in families of algebraic varieties.

He developed the Manin obstruction, indicating the role of the Brauer group in accounting for obstructions to the Hasse principle via Grothendieck's theory of global Azumaya algebras, setting off a generation of further work.

Manin pioneered the field of arithmetic topology (along with John Tate, David Mumford, Michael Artin, and Barry Mazur). He also formulated the Manin conjecture, which predicts the asymptotic behaviour of the number of rational points of bounded height on algebraic varieties.