Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (Hebrew: איליה פיאטצקי-שפירו; ; 30 March 1929 – 21 February 2009) was a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician. During a career that spanned 60 years he made major contributions to applied science as well as pure mathematics. In his last forty years his research focused on pure mathematics; in particular, analytic number theory, group representations and algebraic geometry. His main contribution and impact was in the area of automorphic forms and L-functions. For the last 30 years of his life he suffered from Parkinson's disease. However, with the help of his wife Edith, he was able to continue to work and do mathematics at the highest level, even when he was barely able to walk and speak. Moscow years: 1929–1959 Ilya was born in 1929 in Moscow, Soviet Union. Both his father, Iosif Grigor'evich, and mother, Sofia Arkadievna, were from traditional Jewish families, but which had become assimilated. His father was from Berdichev, a small city in the Ukraine, with a largely Jewish population. His mother was from Gomel, a similar small city in Belorussia. Both parents' families were middle-class, but they sank into poverty after the October revolution of 1917. Ilya became interested in mathematics at the age of 10, struck, as he wrote in his short memoir, "by the charm and unusual beauty of negative numbers", which his father, a PhD in chemical engineering, showed him. In 1952, Piatetski-Shapiro won the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize for a Young Mathematician for work done while still an undergraduate at Moscow University. His winning paper<ref>{{cite journal|last=Pyateckiĭ-Šapiro|first=I.I.|title=Supplement to the work "On the problem of uniqueness of expansion of a function in a trigonometric series.|journal=Moskov. Gos. Univ. Uč. Zap. Mat.|year=1954|volume=165|issue=7|pages=79–97}}</ref> contained a solution to the problem of the French analyst Raphaël Salem on sets of uniqueness of trigonometric series. The award was especially remarkable because of the atmosphere of strong anti-Semitism in Soviet Union at that time. Despite the award, and a very strong recommendation by his mentor Alexander O. Gelfond, a professor of mathematics at Moscow University and an important Communist Party member (Gelfond’s father was a friend of Lenin), Piatetski-Shapiro’s application to graduate program at Moscow University was rejected. Ilya was ultimately admitted to the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, where he received his Ph.D. in 1954 under the direction of Alexander Buchstab. His early work was in classical analytic number theory. This includes his paper on what is now known as the