Nikolai Nikolayevich Lusin

Nikolai Luzin ( Russian Николай Николаевич Лузин ; born November 27 ^{. Jul} / 9. December 1883 ^{. Greg} Irkutsk ; † 28. January 1950 , Moscow ) was a Soviet / Russian mathematicians. He became famous for his work in descriptive set theory and the aspects of mathematical analysis with strong links to topology .

Life

Lusin was the son of a civil servant and began studying mathematics in 1901 at Moscow University with Dmitri Yegorov . 1905/06 (when the university in Moscow was closed because of the revolution) he went to study in Paris , where he heard from Émile Borel and met Jacques Hadamard and Henri Poincaré , which had a lasting influence on his mathematical work. In 1910 he made his diploma. From 1910 to 1914 he studied for three years in Göttingen, where he was influenced by Edmund Landau , and in Paris with a travel grant that Jegorow got him . In 1912 he published what was later known as Lusin 's theorem. He then returned to Moscow, where he lectured from 1914. In 1915 he submitted the monograph integral and trigonometric series ( Russian Интеграл и тригонометрический ряд ) as a candidate work. On the recommendation of the reviewers, this work was accepted as a dissertation (Russian doctorate, corresponding to a habilitation ). In 1917 he became a professor.

During the Russian Civil War, Lusin left Moscow in 1918 and went to the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Polytechnic Institute (today: Ivanovo State Chemical and Technological University ). In 1922 he returned to Moscow.

In the 1920s, Lusin organized a famous research seminar at Moscow University. Among his doctoral students were some of the later best-known Soviet mathematicians: Pavel Alexandrow , Nina Bari , Alexander Chintschin , Andrei Kolmogorow , Alexander Kronrod , Mikhail Lavrentiev , Lasar Ljusternik , Pyotr Novikov , Lyudmila Keldysch , Lev Schnirelman and Pawel Urysohn . Ivan Priwalow , Dmitri Menschow and Michail Suslin , with whom he founded the theory of analytical sets and thus an important part of descriptive set theory in 1917 , also counted among his students . Suslin died in 1919.

In 1928 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna (Sur les voies de le théorie des ensembles). In 1929 he became a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences . From 1930 he was at the Steklow Institute of the Soviet Academy.

Affair Lusin

From July to August 1936, Lusin was criticized in a number of articles in Pravda . Lusin was summoned before a commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR , which condemned him as an enemy of the people . Even before the Pravda Articles, this method was used against a number of old Moscow professors. On November 21, 1930, a group from the Moscow Mathematical Society claimed that there were active counter-revolutionaries among mathematicians. This group also included former students of Lusin such as Ljusternik, Schnirelman, Alexander Gelfond and Lev Pontryagin . Some were directly referred to, such as his mentor Yegorov, who had already been arrested and died in 1931.

The political offensive against Lusin was carried out not only by the Stalinist authorities, but also by a group of Lusin's students, led by Pavel Alexandrov . In addition to idealism, the allegations also included the fact that he mainly published abroad and had good contacts abroad (especially with the French mathematicians Borel and Lebesgue) and that he stole the results from younger mathematicians. One of the driving forces behind the campaign was the Marxist philosopher and Communist Party functionary Ernst Kolman , who was probably also behind the anonymous attacks on Lusin in Pravda. Although condemned by the commission, Lusin was neither expelled from the academy, nor arrested, but not rehabilitated even after Stalin's death. There was speculation as to why he didn't disappear into the gulag like others , but that could never really be cleared up. The case files show that the charges against Lusin were toned down by the Kremlin. The fall of Lusin marked the beginning of the years of political attacks on genetics, relativity, and other parts of free scientific thought.

In the case of Kolmogorov and his close friend Alexandrov, the attacks on Lusin were also motivated by personal motives. Both emancipated themselves in their own areas (Kolmogorow in probability theory, Alexandrow in topology) from the Lusin school and thus eluded the dominant influence of Lusin. As Kolmogorov pointed out in his last interview, there were tensions with Lusin. Lusin had precise ideas about what his students should be concerned with and posed problems for them based on his assessment of their abilities. Before the First World War, he started Alexandrov on the continuum problem, which much later turned out to be unsolvable and almost led Alexandrov to turn away from mathematics entirely.

In 1946 there was another clash between Kolmogorov as a representative of the younger mathematicians who were victorious in the Lusin affair and Lusin. He had voted against Pavel Alexandrov in the elections for the Academy of Sciences, which is why Kolmogorov slapped him publicly in the corridor of the Academy. Kolmogorow temporarily lost all administrative positions.

Lusitania

Lusin was the namesake of "Lusitania", a loose grouping of young Moscow mathematicians in the first half of the 1920s. They took Lusin's set-theoretic approach and began to apply it to other areas of mathematics .

literature

Esther Phillips: Nicolai Nicolaevich Luzin and the Moscow School of the theory of functions , Historia Mathematica, Volume 5, 1978, 275-305
Charles Ford The influence of PA Florensky on NN Luzin , Historia Mathematica, Volume 25, 1998, 332-339
Sergei Demidov, Aleksei N. Parshin, Sergei M. Polovinkin, Pavel V. Florensky (eds.) The correspondence between NN Luzin and PA Florensky (Russian), Istoriko-Matematicheskiye Issledovanyia, Volume 31, 1989, pp. 125–191 (and Introduction pp. 116–124)
Sergei Demidov The Moscow School of the theory of functions , in Smilka Zdravkovska, Peter Duren The golden years of Moscow mathematics , AMS 1993
A. Paplauscas, Luzin article in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
S. Demidov, BV Lesvshin (ed.): The affair Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Lusin (Russian), Moscow 1999
- English translation: The case of Academician Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, AMS 2016
AE Levin: Anatomy of a public campaign: "Academician Luzin's case" in Soviet political history , Slavic Review, Volume 49, 1990, pp. 90-108.
S. Demidov: From the early history of the Moscow school of function theory, Philosophia Mathematica, Volume 3, 1988, pp. 29-35
Lusin, Collected Works (Russian), 3 volumes, Moscow 1953–1959
Loren Graham, Jean-Michel Kantor : Naming Infinity, Harvard University Press 2009
GG Lorentz: Mathematics and Politics in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953, Journal of Approximation Theory, 16, 2002, 169-223

Web links

Individual evidence

^ Mathematical Intelligencer, 2001, No. 1

personal data
SURNAME	Lusin, Nikolai Nikolayevich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Luzin, Nikolaĭ Nikolaevich; Lusin, NN; Luzin, Nikolaj Nikolaevič
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Russian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	December 9, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH	Irkutsk
DATE OF DEATH	January 28, 1950
Place of death	Moscow

[1] Mathematical Intelligencer, 2001, No. 1