Nikolai Muskhelishvili

Born Feb. 4 (16), 1891, in Tbilisi. Soviet mathematician and specialist in mechanics. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939; corresponding member, 1933) and member of the academy’s presidium (from 1957). Academician (1941), president (1941–72), and honorary president (since 1972) of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR. Hero of Socialist Labor (1945). Member of the CPSU since 1940.

Muskhelishvili graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1914. In 1922 he was appointed a professor at the university and polytechnical institute in Tbilisi. In 1941 he was made director of the A. M. Razmadze Tbilisi Mathematics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR.

Muskhelishvili’s research is of a basic nature and deals with elasticity theory, integral equations, and boundary value problems in function theory. Muskhelishvili was one of the first to apply the theory of functions of a complex variable to problems in elasticity theory and proposed a number of methods successfully used in other branches of mathematics, as well as in theoretical physics and mechanics. He has solved all the fundamental problems in plane elasticity theory in the static case. He discovered a broad class of regions for which a plane problem reduces to a finite linear system of algebraic equations. Muskhelishvili made fundamental contributions to the theory of linear boundary value problems for analytic functions and one-dimensional integral equations with singular kernels. He derived an important index formula for a system of singular integral equations.

Muskhelishvili was a deputy to the first through eighth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He is a member of many foreign academies, scientific institutions, and societies. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1941 and 1947 and the M. V. Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1972. He has also been awarded five Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, and two other orders, as well as several medals and two foreign orders.