12 Facts About Mark Naimark

Mark Aronovich Naimark was a Soviet mathematician who made important contributions to functional analysis and mathematical physics.

Mark Naimark's father was Aron Iakovlevich Naimark, a professional artist, and his mother Zefir Moiseevna.

Mark Naimark was four years old at the onset of World War I in 1914, and seven when the tumultuous Russian Revolution began in 1917.

Mark Naimark married his wife Larisa Petrovna Shcherbakova in 1932, with whom he had two sons.

In 1933, Naimark began graduate studies at Odessa State University in the Department of the Theory of Functions.

Mark Naimark was supervised by the functional analyst Mark Krein, completing his candidate's dissertation in 1936.

In 1938 Naimark began his doctoral studies at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where he developed his renowned work on self-adjoint extensions of symmetric operators, and began a collaboration with Israel Gelfand that lasted for over a decade.

Mark Naimark received his doctorate in 1941, and was made a chair at the Seismological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Mark Naimark was appointed a professor at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in 1962, where he stayed for the remainder of his career, and supervised seven doctoral students.

Mark Naimark worked especially on second-order singular differential operators with a continuous spectrum, using eigenfunctions to describe their spectral decompositions and studying the concept of a spectral singularity.

Mark Naimark's results are summarized in the monograph Linear Differential Operators, which was published in 1954.

In 1956 Naimark published his monograph Normed Rings which gave the first comprehensive treatment of Banach algebras and was enormously influential in the development of the field.