15 Facts About Lyudmila Keldysh

Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was a Soviet mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology.

Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was born on 12 March 1904 in Orenburg, Russia to Mariya Aleksandrovna and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh.

Lyudmila Keldysh's family was descended from Russian nobility and though they were well-to-do before the Russian Revolution, they would later face difficulty because of their heritage.

Lyudmila Keldysh continued her education at the Moscow State University, graduating in 1925.

Lyudmila Keldysh began teaching in 1930 at the Moscow Aviation Institute.

That same year, she married Novikov and published three papers: On the Homeomorphism of Canonical Elements of the 3rd Class; On Simple Functions of Class a; and On the Structure of B Measurable Functions of Class a The following year, Stalin began his purges and Keldysh lost both an uncle and a nephew, and her parents were both arrested, though later released.

Lyudmila Keldysh had continued her research on Borel sets and in 1941 defended her thesis, but before she received her degree the family fled the advancing German troops.

Lyudmila Keldysh had two daughters, Nina and then Elena, during this time.

Lyudmila Keldysh published a paper, On the structure of measurable sets B in 1944, and followed it in 1945 with Open mappings of A-sets, which marked a turning point in her work.

Lyudmila Keldysh was finally able, in 1945, to have her thesis published and from this point on, her work focused more on geometric topology.

Lyudmila Keldysh continued publishing from the mid-1940s into the 1960s.

Lyudmila Keldysh's research was honored repeatedly in this period and she received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the Order of Maternal Glory in the 2nd degree and in 1958 received the Prize of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

In 1964, Lyudmila Keldysh was made a full professor at Moscow State University and in 1966 she published the book Topological embeddings into Euclidean space to help her students understand her lectures.

Lyudmila Keldysh lectured until 1974, when she resigned in protest of the expulsion of one of her students.

Lyudmila Keldysh died one year and one month later, on 16 February 1976 in Moscow.