Dror Bar-Natan

Dror Bar-Natan (Hebrew: דרוֹר בָר-נָתָן; born January 30, 1966) is a Canadian-Israeli mathematician specializing in knot theory, finite type invariants, and Khovanov homology. He is currently a professor at the University of Toronto. Bar-Natan earned his BSc in mathematics at Tel Aviv University in 1984. After performing his mandatory military service as a teacher, he went to study at Princeton University in 1987. He obtained his PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1991, under the direction of physicist Edward Witten. After holding a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professorship at Harvard University for four years from 1991 to 1995, he returned to Israel, and became associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He moved to the University of Toronto in 2002, and was promoted to full professor in 2006. Bar-Natan holds US, Israeli, and Canadian citizenship, and currently resides in Canada. Bar-Natan originally refused to take the Canadian citizenship oath because it would require him to swear allegiance to royalty. He later decided to become a citizen but publicly announced his intention to renounce the oath immediately after becoming a citizen, which he did so in front of the presiding judge at his citizenship ceremony on November 30, 2015.