Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov (mathematician)

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Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov.

Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov (Russian: Владимир Иванович Смирнов) (June 10, 1887, Saint Petersburg, Russia - February 11, 1974, Leningrad, USSR) was a Russian mathematician who made significant contributions in both pure and applied mathematics, as well as the history of mathematics.

Smirnov worked on diverse areas of mathematics, such as complex functions and conjugate functions in euclidean spaces. In the applied field his work includes the propagation of waves in elastic media with plane boundaries (with Sobolev) and the oscillations of elastic spheres.

In 1939 he applied Kolmogorov's statistic,

$\max_x\left| F_n(x) - F_0(x)\right| ,\,$

(where F_n is an empirical distribution function and F₀ is the distribution according to a null hypothesis) to test the statistical equality of the distributions of two populations. One of the most important of the 'distribution-free' statistics, it is now known as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

Smirnov was a Ph.D. student of Vladimir Steklov. Sergei Sobolev was among his students.

Smirnov is also widely known among students for his five volume book A Course in Higher Mathematics written with Jacob Tamarkin.