Vladimir Georgievich Turaev (Владимир Георгиевич Тураев, born in 1954) is a Russian mathematician, specializing in topology.
Turaev received in 1979 from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics his Candidate of Sciences degree (PhD) under Oleg Viro.[1] Turaev was a professor at the University of Strasbourg and then became a professor at Indiana University. In 2016, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Turaev's research deals with low-dimensional topology, quantum topology, and knot theory and their interconnections with quantum field theory. In 1991, Reshetikhin and Turaev published a mathematical construction of new topological invariants of compact oriented 3-manifolds and framed links in these manifolds, corresponding to a mathematical implementation of ideas in quantum field theory published by Witten;[2] the invariants are now called Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev (or Reshetikhin-Turaev) invariants. In 1992, Turaev and Viro introduced a new family of invariants for 3-manifolds by using state sums computed on triangulations of manifolds;[3] these invariants are now called Turaev-Viro invariants.
In 1990, Turaev was an Invited Speaker with talk State sum models in low dimensional topology at the ICM in Kyōto.[4] In 2016, he shared, with Alexis Virelizier, the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize for their monograph Monoidal categories and topological field theory.