Everything about Andrey Kolmogorov totally explained
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Russian: Андре́й Никола́евич Колмого́ров) (
April 25,
1903 -
October 20,
1987) was a
Soviet mathematician who made major advances in different scientific fields (among them
probability theory,
topology,
intuitionistic logic,
turbulence,
classical mechanics and
computational complexity). Kolmogorov is widely considered one of the pre-eminent mathematicians of the 20
th century.
Biography
Early life
Kolmogorov was born at
Tambov in 1903. His unwed mother died in childbirth and he was raised by his aunts in
Tunoshna near
Yaroslavl at the
estate of his grandfather, a wealthy nobleman. His father, an
agronomist by trade, was deported from
Saint-Petersburg for participation in the revolutionary movement. He went missing in the
Russian Civil War.
Kolmogorov was educated in his aunts' village school, and his earliest literary efforts and mathematical papers were printed in the school newspaper. As an adolescent he designed
perpetual motion machines, concealing their defects so cleverly that his secondary-school teachers couldn't discover them. In 1910 his aunt adopted him and they moved to
Moscow, where he went to a gymnasium (the equivalent of a United States high school), graduating from it in 1920.
In 1920 Kolmogorov began to study at
Moscow University and the Chemistry Technological Institute. Kolmogorov gained a reputation for his wide-ranging erudition. As an undergraduate, he participated in the seminar of Russian
historian S.V. Bachrushin and published his first research paper on
landholding practices in the
Novgorod Republic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At the same time (1921-1922), Kolmogorov obtained several results in
set theory and the theory of
trigonometrical series.
Maturity
In 1922 Kolmogorov constructed a
Fourier series that diverges almost everywhere, gaining international recognition. Around this time he decided to devote his life to
mathematics. In 1925 Kolmogorov graduated from
Moscow State University, and began to study under the supervision of
Nikolai Luzin. He made lifelong friends with
Pavel Alexandrov who involved Kolmogorov in 1936 in an ugly political persecution of their mutual teacher, the so-called
Luzin case or
Luzin affair. Kolmogorov (together with
A. Khinchin) became interested in
probability theory. Also in 1925, he published his famous work in
intuitionistic logic -
On the principle of the excluded middle. In 1929 Kolmogorov earned his
Ph.D. at
Moscow State University.
In 1930 Kolmogorov went on his first long trip abroad, traveling to
Göttingen,
Munich, and then to
Paris. His pioneering work
About the Analytical Methods of Probability Theory was published (in German) in 1931, the same year he became a professor at Moscow University. In 1933 Kolmogorov published
Foundations of the Theory of Probability, laying the modern
foundations of probability theory and establishing his reputation as one of the world's experts in this field. In 1935, Kolmogorov became the first chair of probability theory at the
Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of
Moscow State University. In 1939 he was elected a full member (academician) of the
USSR Academy of Sciences. In a 1938 paper he "established the basic theorems for smoothing and predicting stationary
stochastic processes" — a paper that would have major military applications during the
Cold War to come.
Later on, Kolmogorov switched his research interests to the area of
turbulence, where his 1941 works had significant influence on the field. In
classical mechanics he's best known for the
KAM theory (first presented in 1954 in
Amsterdam, during the
International Congress of Mathematicians). In 1957 he solved
Hilbert's thirteenth problem (a joint work with his student
V. I. Arnold). He was a founder of
algorithmic complexity theory, often referred to as
Kolmogorov complexity theory, which he began to develop around this time.
Kolmogorov married Anna Dmitrievna Egorova in 1942. He pursued a vigorous teaching routine throughout his life, not only at the university level but also with younger children, as he was actively involved in developing a pedagogy for
gifted children, in
literature and
music as well as
mathematics. At the University, he occupied different positions, including the head of several departments (
probability,
statistics and
random processes,
mathematical logic) and also served as dean of the
Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics.
In 1971 he joined an
oceanographic expedition aboard the research vessel
Dmitri Mendeleev. He wrote a number of articles for the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In his later years he devoted much of his effort to the mathematical and philosophical relationship between
probability theory in abstract and applied areas.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Andrey Kolmogorov'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://andrey_kolmogorov.totallyexplained.com">Andrey Kolmogorov Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
