Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov

Born May 29 (June 10), 1887, in St. Petersburg; died Feb. 11, 1974, in Leningrad. Soviet mathematician. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1943; corresponding member, 1932). Hero of Socialist Labor (1967).

Smirnov graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1910 and became a professor there in 1915. From 1912 to 1930 he was a professor at the St. Petersberg (Leningrad) Institute of Railroad Engineers. Between 1929 and 1935 he was on the staff of the Institute of Seismology and the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Smirnov’s principal works are on the theory of functions of a complex variable; they deal with the uniformization of multiple-valued analytic functions, Fuchsian groups, Fuchsian functions, the completeness of a system of polynomials orthogonal on a rectifiable closed path, and the limiting values of analytic functions. In a number of studies done with S. L. Sobolev, Smirnov developed a new method for the solution of certain problems in the theory of wave propagation in elastic media with plane boundaries. He also investigated functionally invariant solutions of linear elliptic equations with an arbitrary number of variables.

For his work A Course of Higher Mathematics (vols. 1–5, 1924-47), Smirnov received the State Prize of the USSR in 1948. His students included G. M. Goluzin, I. A. Lappo-Dani-levskii, and S. L. Sobolev. Smirnov was awarded four Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and several medals.