Andrey Nikolayevich Tychonoff

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Andrey N. Tychonoff.

Andrey Nikolayevich Tychonoff (Russian: Андрей Николаевич Тихонов) (October 30, 1906, Gzhatsk – November 8, 1993, Moscow) was a Russian mathematician. Tychonoff originally published in German, whence the transliteration. The English style "Tikhonov" is also commonly seen.

Born near Smolensk, he studied at the Moscow State University where he received Ph.D. in 1927 under direction of P.S. Alexandrov. In 1933 he was appointed as a professor at Moscow University.

Tychonoff worked in a number of different fields in mathematics. He made important contributions to topology, functional analysis, mathematical physics, and certain classes of ill-posed problems. Tikhonov regularization, one of the most widely used methods to solve inverse problems, is named in his honour. He is best known for his work on topology, including the metrization theorem he proved in 1926, and the Theorem of Tychonoff, which states that every product of arbitrarily many compact topological spaces is again compact. In his honor, completely regular topological spaces are also named Tychonoff spaces.

Tychonoff received numerous honors and awards for his work, lincluding the Lenin Prize (1966) and the Hero of Socialist Labor (1954, 1986). He was a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.