Person: Naimark, Mark Aronovich
Mark Aronovich Naimark was a Ukranian mathematician who worked in functional analysis and mathematical physics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Mark Aronovich was brought up by his Jewish parents Aron Iakovlevich and Zefir Moiseevna in Odessa where he showed an outstanding talent for mathematics while at school.
- At Odessa State University Naimark's studies were supervised by Mark Grigorievich Krein who, although only two years older than Naimark, had completed his doctorate in 1929 and had begun to build up a functional analysis research group.
- With Krein, Naimark worked on applying Bezout's determinant to the problem of separating the roots of an algebraic equation.
- Naimark defended his candidate's dissertation (equivalent to a Ph.D. thesis) The theory of normal operators in Hilbert space in 1936 then moved to Moscow in 1938.
- We have already noted that Naimark's first work was on the separation of roots of algebraic equations but, once he had established himself in Moscow, he worked on functional analysis and group representations.
- In 1943 he proved the Gelfand-Naimark theorem on self-adjoint algebras of operators in Hilbert space.
- Naimark also made substantial contributions to Banach algebras.
- In 1958 Naimark published Linear representations of the Lorentz group.
- In all Naimark wrote 123 papers and 5 books but he also put considerable effort into the translations and further editions of the books.
- By the time this book was written Naimark was suffering from heart disease, a problem which afflicted him during the last ten years of his life.
- The book only covers finite-dimensional group representations but, despite his illness, Naimark states in the Preface that he hoped to write a sequel on the analytic and infinite-dimensional theory.
- He had a remarkable gift for explaining things simply and intelligibly.
Born 5 December 1909, Odessa, Ukraine. Died 30 December 1978, Moscow, USSR.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Ukraine
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
