Nikolai Luzin
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Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, Russian: Никола́й Никола́евич Лу́зин (December 9, 1883, Irkutsk – January 28, 1950, Moscow), was a Soviet/Russian mathematician. He was noted for his work in descriptive set theory and aspects of mathematical analysis with strong connections to point-set topology. He was the eponym of Luzitania, a loose grouping of young Moscow mathematicians in the first half of the 1920s. They adopted his set-theoretic orientation, and went on to apply it in other areas of mathematics.
He started studying mathematics in 1901 at Moscow University, where his advisor was Dimitri Egorov. From 1910 to 1914 he studied at Göttingen, where he was influenced by Edmund Landau. He then resurned to Moscow and received Ph.D. in 1915. During Russian Civil War (1918 – 1920) Luzin left Moscow for the Polytechnical Institute Ivanovo-Voznesensk (now called Ivanovo State University of Chemistry and Technology). He returned to Moscow in 1920.
In the 1920s Luzin organized a famous research seminar at Moscow University. His doctoral students included some of the most famous Soviet mathematicians: Pavel Aleksandrov, Nina Bari, Aleksandr Khinchin, Andrey Kolmogorov, Alexander Kronrod, Mikhail Lavrentyev, Lazar Lyusternik, Pyotr Novikov, Lev Schnirelmann, and Pavel Urysohn.
In July-August 1936 Luzin was criticised in Pravda, notably for supposedly publishing his best papers in western journals and only minor ones in the USSR. Other accusations include holding reactionary ideas and claiming other's work as his own. After the series of articles, Soviet mathematicians only rarely published papers abroad.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Nikolai Luzin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Nikolai Luzin". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
- The 1936 Luzin affair – from the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
