15 Facts About Nikolai Luzin

Nikolai Luzin was the eponym of Luzitania, a loose group of young Moscow mathematicians of the first half of the 1920s.

Nikolai Luzin started studying mathematics in 1901 at Moscow State University, where his advisor was Dmitri Egorov.

The correspondence between the two men continued for many years and Nikolai Luzin was greatly influenced by Florensky's religious treatise The Pillar and Foundation of Truth.

From 1910 to 1914 Nikolai Luzin studied at Gottingen, where he was influenced by Edmund Landau.

Nikolai Luzin then returned to Moscow and received his Ph.

On 5 January 1927 Nikolai Luzin was elected as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and became a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union first at the Department of Philosophy and then at the Department of Pure Mathematics.

Nikolai Luzin's first significant result was a construction of an almost everywhere divergent trigonometric series with monotonic convergence to zero coefficients.

Nikolai Luzin was one of the founders of descriptive set theory.

Nikolai Luzin made contributions to complex analysis, the theory of differential equations, and numerical methods.

Vygodsky dating from 1932, Nikolai Luzin expresses sympathy with Vygodsky's infinitesimal approach to developing calculus.

Nikolai Luzin then left the position of director of the Moscow Mathematical Society and was replaced by Ernst Kolman.

At the hearing, Alexandrov, Lyusternik, Khinchin, Kolmogorov and some other students of Nikolai Luzin accused him of plagiarism from Pyotr Novikov and Mikhail Suslin and various forms of misconduct, which included denying promotions to Kolmogorov and Khinchin.

However, this outcome did not seem to satisfy the instigators of the case, so that from the second hearing on, the nature of accusations shifted: now the primary focus was the fact that Nikolai Luzin published his papers extensively in France rather than in Soviet journals, and his pre-Soviet sympathies were brought to the forefront.

Historian of mathematics Adolph P Yushkevich speculated that at the time, Stalin was more concerned with the forthcoming Moscow trials of Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev and others, whereas the eventual fate of Luzin was of a little interest to him.

In 1976, Martian crater Nikolai Luzin was named in his honor.