Two Harvard-Affiliated Math Professors Receive 2026 Wolf Prize in Mathematics

The Wolf Foundation named two former Harvard math professors 2026 Wolf Prize Laureates in Mathematics. Joseph Bernstein and David Kazhdan share the prize for their “foundational work on representation theory, automorphic forms and algebraic geometry, and their role in creating geometric representation theory”. Specifically, their groundbreaking ideas created new bridges between algebra, geometry, and analysis, and helped lay the foundations of a major field in modern mathematics—geometric representation theory. The concepts and tools they developed have become cornerstones of mathematical research and continue to play a central role in addressing deep problems across many areas, from group theory to the Langlands program.

David Kazhdan is a Harvard math Professor Emeritus and a Professor of Mathematics at Tel Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. In recent years, he continues to play a leading role in a surprisingly diverse range of problems, from supersymmetric quantum field theory and its mathematical ramifications to Ramsey theory and its surprising connections to algebraic geometry.

Joseph Bernstein was a Harvard math professor from 1983 until 1993. Currently, he is a Professor of Mathematics at Tel Aviv University, Israel. A distinctive characteristic of his work is his insistence on utter simplicity and clarity of both question and answer. This way of thinking itself has had a great influence on the community.

The Wolf Prize is awarded annually and honors exceptional individuals who transcend barriers of religion, gender, race, geography, and political stance for the betterment of humanity. In the scientific domain, the awards are conferred in Medicine, Agriculture, Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics. Over the course of 47 years, 391 scientists and artists have been honored. The prize in each field consists of a diploma, a Medal of Honor, and $100,000.