Born in Chișinău (now in Moldova) he grew up in Tajikistan, before studying at Tel Aviv University under Joseph Bernstein (1990–1996). He received his doctorate in 1997 for a thesis entitled "Automorphic Sheaves and Eisenstein Series". He has been awarded a Harvard Junior Fellowship, a Clay Research Fellowship, and the prize of the European Mathematical Society for his work.

His work in geometric Langlands culminated in a joint 2002 paper with Edward Frenkel and Kari Vilonen,^[1] establishing the conjecture for finite fields, and a separate 2004 paper,^[2] generalizing the proof to include the field of complex numbers as well.

Prior to his current appointment at MPIM Bonn, he was a professor of mathematics at Harvard and an associate professor at the University of Chicago from 2001–2005.

In 2025, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.^[3]

• Gaitsgory, Dennis; Rozenblyum, Nick (2017). A Study in Derived Algebraic Geometry. American Mathematical Society. ISBN 978-1-4704-3569-1.
• Gaitsgory, Dennis; Lurie, Jacob (19 February 2019). Weil's Conjecture for Function Fields: Volume I (AMS-199). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-18443-2.

• Dennis Gaitsgory at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Gaitsgory's thesis