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Person: Povzner, Aleksandr Yakovlevich

Aleksandr Povzner was a Ukranian-born mathematician who worked in the spectral theory of differential operators.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• Aleksandr was brought up in Poltava where he attended a seven-year school and then a school for metal workers.
• Povzner spent much time with Chebotaryov in Kazan while undertaking research in algebra.
• Povzner solved this in the case of abelian groups in his first published paper.
• Chebotaryov gave Povzner and interest in Lie groups and he published On binomial Lie groups (1938) which gave a system of axioms defining a binomial Lie group.
• Following the award of his Master's degree, Povzner was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Algebra of the University of Kharkov in 1938.
• Levitan, who was one year older than Povzner, had been both an undergraduate and a graduate student at the University of Kharkov before being appointed as a professor in 1941.
• Both Levitan and Povzner were serving in the army when they collaborated on their joint paper.
• After being demobilised from the army, Povzner returned to take up his teaching position at the University of Kharkov and submitted his doctoral dissertation (equivalent to the German habilitation) to Moscow State University.
• After his appointment to the University of Kharkov in 1946, Povzner continued to teach there until 1960 when he took up a position in the Institute of Chemical Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
• The years during which he worked at Kharkov were ones during which the mathematical school there blossomed due not only to Povzner but also to Naum Il'ich Akhiezer and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Marchenko.
• In addition to the work we have already mentioned, we note that Povzner was the first to apply the technique of transformation operators of Volterra type to spectral theory in 1948.
• Let us look now at an important book which Povzner wrote in collaboration with V N Bogaevskii, namely Algebraic methods in nonlinear perturbation theory.

Born 27 June 1915, Poltava, Ukraine. Died 21 April 2008, Washington, D.C., USA.

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive