Vladimir Arnold — math (legend) with roots in the USSR
He was born in Odessa in June 1937 and grew up in Moscow, the eldest of three children of the mathematician Igor Arnold and Nina Isakovich, whose family came from Odessa. Several generations on both sides had been scientists. He said his interest in mathematics began at about five, with the old merchant problems that Russian families traditionally set their children - problems small children enjoy and solve, and that university graduates often cannot, having been spoiled by formal training.
He was also frank about what nearly closed the door. His maternal grandfather was shot in 1938 on a charge of espionage for England, Germany, Greece and Japan simultaneously, and his mother was Jewish. He observed that had he reached university age before Stalin's death in 1953, or after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, admission would probably have been impossible for him. He entered the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University in 1954, in the window between.
He thought the faculty of those years unmatched anywhere he later saw - Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Petrovsky, Pontryagin, Khinchin and Aleksandrov teaching, with Manin, Sinai, Anosov and Kirillov among the students. Kolmogorov took him on.
In 1957, a third-year undergraduate of nineteen, he completed a solution Kolmogorov had begun and settled Hilbert's thirteenth problem: every continuous function of several variables can be built from a finite number of continuous functions of two variables. It is now the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, and it answered in the negative a question Hilbert had set the century in 1900.
What followed was one of the broadest bodies of work in twentieth-century mathematics. With Kolmogorov and Jurgen Moser he established KAM theory, which explains why nearly integrable systems - planetary orbits among them - remain stable under small perturbations, and which is the reason the solar system is not obviously falling apart. He posed the ADE classification problem, founded symplectic topology, and co-founded topological Galois theory with his student Askold Khovanskii. Arnold diffusion, Arnold tongues, the Liouville-Arnold theorem, the Arnold conjectures and the cat map all carry his name, the last from a sketch of a cat's head he drew to illustrate a mixing map.
He became a professor at Moscow State University at twenty-eight, worked at the Steklov Institute, and from 1993 divided the year between Moscow and Paris-Dauphine. He argued vigorously against teaching mathematics as an abstract formal system, holding that mathematics is a branch of physics and physics an experimental science.
He received the Wolf Prize in 2001 and the Shaw Prize in 2008, and by 2006 had the highest citation count of any Russian scientist. An asteroid is named Vladarnolda. He died in Paris in June 2010, nine days short of his seventy-third birthday.
"Odessa to Moscow in childhood; from 1993 divided the year between Moscow and Paris"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa (Ukraine)
His maternal grandfather was shot in 1938 on a charge of simultaneous espionage for four countries. Arnold said that, with a Jewish mother and that record, admission to Moscow State University would probably have been impossible had he come of age before 1953 or after 1968. He entered in 1954.
Born in Odessa in 1937 to the mathematician Igor Arnold and Nina Isakovich, whose family came from the city; several generations on both sides were scientists. He grew up in Moscow.
Odessa (Ukraine). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.