Boris Levitan

Boris Levitan
1996
Born	7 June 1914(1914-06-07) Berdyansk, Belarus, Russian Empire
Died	4 April 2004(2004-04-04) (aged 89) Minneapolis, USA
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	Kharkov State University
Doctoral advisor	Naum Akhiezer
Known for	Gelfand–Levitan equation, Levitan almost-periodic functions
Notable awards	Order of Lenin

Boris Levitan (June 7, 1914 — April 4, 2004) was a mathematician known in particular for his work on almost periodic functions, and Sturm–Liouville operators, especially, on inverse scattering.^[1]

Life

Boris Levitan was born in Berdyansk (now Belarus), and grew up in Kharkov. He graduated from Kharkov University in 1936; in 1938, he submitted his PhD thesis "Some Generalization of Almost Periodic Function" under the supervision of Naum Akhiezer.^[2] Then he defended the habilitation thesis "Theory of Generalized Translation Operators".

He was drafted into the army at the beginning of World War II in 1941, and served until 1944.^[3] From 1944 to 1961 he worked at the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy, and from 1961 in Moscow University. During the last years of his life, he worked in the University of Minnesota.

References

^ Obituary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune
^ Math Genealogy page
^ Kostyuchenko, A.G.; Maslov, V.P.; Sadovnichii, V.A.; Sargsyan, I.S.; Shkalikov, A.A.; Zhikov, V.V. (2006). "In memory of Boris Levitan.". Russ. J. Math. Phys. 13 (1): 1–3.

Persondata
Name	Levitan, Boris
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	June 7, 1914
Place of birth	Berdyansk, Belarus, Russian Empire
Date of death	April 4, 2004
Place of death	Minneapolis, USA