Boris Levitan

Boris Levitan

1996
Born 7 June 1914
Berdyansk, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine)
Died 4 April 2004 (aged 89)
Minneapolis, USA
Fields Mathematics
Alma mater Kharkiv State University
Doctoral advisor Naum Akhiezer
Doctoral students Grigory Isaakovich Barenblatt
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 south-eastern Ukraine), and grew up in Kharkiv. He graduated from Kharkiv 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

  1. Obituary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune
  2. Math Genealogy page
  3. 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): 13.