Aleksandr Khinchin

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Aleksandr Ya. Khinchin
Aleksandr Ya. Khinchin

Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin (Russian Алекса́ндр Я́ковлевич Хи́нчин, French Alexandre Khintchine) (July 19, 1894 – November 18, 1959) was a Russian mathematician and one of the most significant people in the Soviet school of probability theory. He was born in the village of Kondrovo, Kaluga Governorate, Russia. While studying at Moscow State University, he became one of the first followers of the famous Luzin school. Khinchin graduated from the university in 1916 and six years later he became a full professor there, retaining that position until his death.

Khinchin's early works focused on real analysis. Later he applied methods from the metric theory of functions to problems in probability theory and number theory. He became one of the founders of modern probability theory, discovering the law of the iterated logarithm in 1924, achieving important results in the field of limit theorems, giving a definition of a stationary process and laying a foundation for the theory of such processes. Khinchin made significant contributions to the metric theory of Diophantine approximations and established an important result for simple real continued fractions, discovering the property now known as Khinchin's constant. He also published several important works on statistical physics, where he used the methods of probability theory, and on information theory, queuing theory and mathematical analysis.

In 1939 Khinchin was elected as a Correspondent Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was awarded the USSR State Prize (1941), the Order of Lenin, three other orders, and medals.

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[edit] Bibliography

  • Sur la Loi des Grandes Nombres, in Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences, Paris, 1929
  • Continued Fractions, Mineola, N.Y. : Dover Publications, 1997, ISBN 0-486-69630-8 (first published in Moscow, 1935)
  • Three Pearls of Number Theory, Mineola, NY : Dover Publications, 1998, ISBN 0-486-40026-3 (first published in Moscow and Leningrad, 1947)
  • Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Statistics, Mineola, N.Y. : Dover Publications, 1998, ISBN 0-486-40025-5 (first published in Moscow and Leningrad, 1951)

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