Sorin Popa

Sorin Teodor Popa is a Romanian American mathematician working on operator algebras. He is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.

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Biography

Popa earned his PhD from the University of Bucharest in 1983 under the supervision of Dan-Virgil Voiculescu, with thesis Studiul unor clase de subalgebre ale -algebrelor. He has advised 15 doctoral students at UCLA, including Adrian Ioana.

Honors and awards

In 1990, Popa was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto, where he gave a talk on "Subfactors and Classifications in von Neumann algebras". He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1995. In 2006, he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Madrid on "Deformation and Rigidity for group actions and Von Neumann Algebras". In 2009, he was awarded the Ostrowski Prize, and in 2010 the E. H. Moore Prize. He is one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. In 2013, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the Spring of 2025 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.