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Person: Vitushkin, Anatoli Georgievich

Georgievich Vitushkin was a Russian mathematician who worked on analytic capacity and other parts of mathematical analysis.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• This fact seems hardly mentioned in a number of biographies, a fact which we should realise shows how successful Vitushkin was in not allowing this severe disability to affect his life and career.
• Vitushkin became interested in the problem and, while he was still an undergraduate, he had produced several contributions to this problem.
• Vitushkin graduated from the university with honours in 1954 and became a post-graduate student of Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov.
• In 1957 Vitushkin submitted his thesis Variations of functions of several variables and sufficient conditions for their boundedness (Russian) for his Candidate's degree (equivalent to a Ph.D.).
• This interest was useful to him when, in 1957, after completing his graduate course work, Vitushkin began to work in the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences, where he was concerned not only with pure science but also with technological developments.
• Vitushkin, in addition to working for his doctorate at Moscow State University, also joined the Institute of Applied Mathematics with a group of engineers, and they worked on the mathematical side of the space programme.
• Vitushkin was awarded a doctorate (about the level of the habilitation) by Moscow State University in 1958 for his dissertation On the difficulty of the tabulation problem (Russian).
• There was, however, a difficulty which Vitushkin did not like, namely the secret nature of the work at the Institute of Applied Mathematics meant that professional contacts were severely limited.
• Also in 1965 Vitushkin began lecturing at Moscow State University.
• In 1974 Vitushkin was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Vancouver, Canada in August of that year.
• The trip to Canada for the International Congress of Mathematicians was not Vitushkin's only trip to North America.
• To A G Vitushkin we owe deep and fundamental results in various branches of contemporary real and complex analysis, approximation theory, and complex geometry.
• The Vitushkin criterion for the uniform approximation of holomorphic functions by rational functions has rounded off a century of the development of classical approximation theory in the complex domain and initiated a new period of its development.
• Vitushkin's results concerning the geometry of real hypersurfaces of multidimensional complex space and the theory of holomorphic mappings between them have led to the creation of new approaches and the development of new methods in multidimensional complex analysis.
• A G Vitushkin was the founder and head of a leading scientific school in complex analysis and approximation theory.
• A G Vitushkin's deep original ideas and his inspiring personality have exerted influence on practically all scientists who have been working in complex analysis during the past forty years.
• A G Vitushkin's remarkable research results and the scientific school created by him have played, and will continue to play, a crucial role in the development of complex analysis and geometry in the whole world.
• The bright image of Anatolii Georgievich Vitushkin will remain in our hearts for ever.

Born 25 June 1931, Moscow, Russia. Died 9 May 2004, Moscow, Russia.

View full biography at MacTutor

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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