Sergeĭ S. Demidov

Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin’s life (1883–1950) and work of this outstanding Russian mathematician, member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, coincides with a very difficult period in Russian history: two World Wars, the 1917 revolution in Russia, the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, the civil war of 1917–1922, and finally, the construction of a new type of state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This included collectivization in the agriculture and industrialization of the industry, accompanied by the mass terror that without exception affected all the strata of the Soviet society. Against the background of these dramatic events took place the proces of formation and flourishing of Luzin the scientist, the creator of one of the leading mathematical schools of the 20th century, the Moscow school of function theory, which became one of the cornerstones in the foundation of the Soviet mathematical school. Luzin’s work could be divided into two periods: the first one comprises the problems regarding the metric theory of functions, culminating in his famous dissertation Integral and Trigonometric Series (1915), and the second one that is mainly devoted to the development of problems arising from the theory of analytic sets. The underlying idea of Luzin’s research was the problem of the structure of the arithmetic continuum, which became the super task of his work.

The destiny favored the master: the complex turns of history in which he was involved did not prevent, and sometimes even favored the successful development of his research. And even the catastrophe that broke out over him in 1936 – “the case of Academician Luzin” – ended successfully for him.

Article available under CC BY-NC-ND  license.

License text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/pl/legalcode   

The school known as the Moscow school of the theory of functions or the school of D.F. Egorov – N.N. Luzin, originated in 1910s within the framework of the Moscow philosophical-mathematical school. As a matter of fact, its birth was transplanting into the Moscow soil of the French studies on set theory and the theory of functions (E. Borel, H. Lebesgue, R. Baire). This school appeared as an attempt of Muscovites to reach the front line of modern mathematical studies in an area alien to interests of mathematicians from St.- Petersbourg. The attempt has turned successful: its result was creation (in a very short period) of one of the most effective European schools with its own subjects of studies (analytic sets etc.). As a result of the activity of this school Moscow became one of the leading world mathematical centers. Already in the late 1920s, the research done in this school (through the works of P.S. Aleksandrov, A.O. Gelfond, M.V. Keldysh, A.Ya. Khinchin, A.N. Kolmogorov, M.A. Lavrent’ev, L.A. Lyusternik, P.S. Novikov, L.S. Pontryagin, A.N. Tikhonov, P.S. Urysohn etc.) went out very far from the problems which marked the beginning of the Moscow school of the functions theory.

The First World War marked a turning point in the Russian history. The country entered the war in August 1914 as an empire, and in 1918, when the war ended, its name was: the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1917 it confronted two revolutions – the February and the October Revolutions. As a result of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks ruled the country and began the construction of a new type of state. In 1918 a civil war broke out, which was largely over in 1920, but in some areas continued until 1922. In the end of 1922 the USSR was formed ‒ the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. In this article we analyze the impact which these events had on academic and mathematical life. We discuss the mathematical schools of St. Petersburg and Moscow, mathematical centers in Kazan Kharkov, Kiev and Odessa, academic institutions relocated inland (University of Warsaw ,Riga Polytechnics) and others. We also mention mathematicians immigrants from Russia, who became a common phenomenon in mathematical communities of other countries.