16 Facts About Eugene Dynkin

Eugene Borisovich Dynkin was a Soviet and American mathematician.

Eugene Dynkin made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes.

Eugene Dynkin was born into a Jewish family, living in Leningrad until 1935, when his family was exiled to Kazakhstan.

Two years later, when Eugene Dynkin was 13, his father disappeared in the Gulag.

At the age of 16, in 1940, Eugene Dynkin was admitted to Moscow University.

Eugene Dynkin avoided military service in World War II because of his poor eyesight, and received his MS in 1945 and his PhD in 1948.

Eugene Dynkin became an assistant professor at Moscow, but was not awarded a "chair" until 1954 because of his political undesirability.

In 1968, Eugene Dynkin was forced to transfer from the Moscow University to the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Eugene Dynkin worked there on the theory of economic growth and economic equilibrium.

Eugene Dynkin remained at the Institute until 1976, when he emigrated to the United States.

Eugene Dynkin died at the Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, New York, aged 90.

Eugene Dynkin is considered to be a rare example of a mathematician who made fundamental contributions to two very distinct areas of mathematics: algebra and probability theory.

Eugene Dynkin found the papers difficult to read, and in an attempt to better understand the results, he invented the notion of a "simple root" in a root system.

Eugene Dynkin represented the pairwise angles between these simple roots in the form of a Dynkin diagram.

Eugene Dynkin is considered one of the founders of the modern theory of Markov processes.

Eugene Dynkin's one-hour talk at the 1962 International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm, was delivered by Kolmogorov, since prior to his emigration, Eugene Dynkin was never permitted to travel to the West.