Andrey Kolmogorov
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| Born | April 25, 1903 Tambov, Russia <tr><th>Died</th><td>October 20, 1987 |
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Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Russian: Андре́й Никола́евич Колмого́ров) (April 25, 1903 - October 20, 1987) was a Soviet mathematician who made major advances in the fields of probability theory and topology.
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[edit] Early Life
He was born to an unwed mother who died in childbirth, and was raised by his late mother's unmarried sisters, in a village called Tunosha in southern Russia. He was educated in his aunts' village school, and his earliest literary efforts and mathematical papers were printed in the school newspaper. As an adolescent he designed perpetual-motion machines, concealing their defects so cleverly that his secondary-school teachers could not discover them. Kolmogorov quickly gained a reputation for wide-ranging erudition; as an undergraduate at Moscow State University in the early 1920s, he published his first research paper — not in any branch of mathematics but on landholding practices in fifteenth and sixteenth century Novgorod.<ref>David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, New York, W. H. Freeman, 2001; pp. 137-50.</ref>
[edit] Maturity
Kolmogorov studied under Nikolai Luzin, earning his Ph.D. at Moscow State University in 1929. In 1931 he became a professor at this university. In 1939 he received the title of academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In a 1938 paper he "established the basic theorems for smoothing and predicting stationary stochastic processes"<ref>Salsburg, p. 139.</ref> — a paper that would have major military applications during the Cold War to come. He was a founder of algorithmic complexity theory which is often referred to as simply Kolmogorov complexity theory.
Early in his career, he worked on intuitionistic logic, and Fourier series. He also worked on turbulence, classical mechanics, and information theory. However, his most important work was placing the theory of probability, random variables, and stochastic processes onto a firm mathematical foundation. He developed the pivotal Chapman-Kolmogorov equation in this area.
Kolmogorov married Anna Dmitrievna Egorova in 1942. He pursued a vigorous teaching routine throughout his life, not only at the university level but also with younger children; he was actively involved in developing a pedagogy for gifted children, in literature and music as well as mathematics.
In 1971 he joined an oceanographic expedition aboard the research vessel Dmitri Mendeleev. He wrote a number of articles for the Large Soviet Encyclopedia. In his later years he devoted much effort to the mathematical and philosophical relationship between probability theory in the abstract and real-life problems and applications, work that was unfortunately left unfinished at his death.<ref>Salsburg, pp. 145-7.</ref>
Quote:
- "The theory of probability as mathematical discipline can and should be developed from axioms in exactly the same way as geometry and algebra."
[edit] Notes
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[edit] See also
- Kolmogorov axioms
- Kolmogorov backward equation
- Kolmogorov forward equation (also known as the Fokker-Planck equation)
- Kolmogorov dimension (upper box dimension)
- Kolmogorov complexity
- Kolmogorov continuity theorem
- Kolmogorov extension theorem
- Kolmogorov's inequality
- Kolmogorov space
- Kolmogorov-Smirnov test
- Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser theorem
- Kolmogorov's zero-one law
- Borel-Kolmogorov paradox
- Chapman-Kolmogorov equation
- Chaitin-Kolmogorov randomness
- Hahn-Kolmogorov theorem
- Astronomical seeing described by Kolmogorov's turbulence law
[edit] Bibliography
Writings in English translation
- 1991-93. Selected works of A.N. Kolmogorov, 3 vols. Tikhomirov, V. M., ed., Volosov, V. M., trans. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- 1925. "On the principle of excluded middle" in Jean van Heijenoort, 1967. A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931. Harvard Univ. Press: 414-37.
A bibliography of his works appeared in The Annals of Probability, 17(3): 945--964 (July 1989).
[edit] External links
- The Legacy of Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov Curriculum Vitae and Biography. Kolmogorov School. Ph.D. students and descendants of A.N. Kolmogorov. A.N. Kolmogorov works, books, papers, articles. Photographs and Portraits of A.N. Kolmogorov.
- The origins and legacy of Kolmogorov's Grundbegriffe
- O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Andrey Kolmogorov". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
- A Short Biography of A.N. Kolmogorov, national research institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands
- Collection of links to Kolmogorov resources
- Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (in Russian)
- Kolmogorov School at Moscow University
- Andrey Kolmogorov at the Mathematics Genealogy Projectbg:Андрей Колмогоров
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