Ivan Georgievich Petrovsky () (18 January 1901 – 15 January 1973) (the family name is also transliterated as Petrovskii or Petrowsky) was a Soviet mathematician working mainly in the field of partial differential equations. He greatly contributed to the solution of Hilbert's 19th and 16th problems, and discovered what are now called Petrovsky lacunas. He also worked on the theories of boundary value problems, probability, and on the topology of algebraic curves and surfaces.
Biography
Petrovsky was a student of Dmitri Egorov. Among his students were Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Yevgeniy Landis, Olga Oleinik and Sergei Godunov.
Petrovsky taught at Steklov Institute of Mathematics. He was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences since 1946 and was awarded Hero of Socialist Labor in 1969. He was the president of Moscow State University (1951–1973) and the head of the International Congress of Mathematicians (Moscow, 1966). He is buried in the cemetery of the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow.
Selected publications
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References
. A very ample paper describing Petrovsky's scientific research, authored by friends, collaborators and pupils. : the original paper translated in , and also in the Russian Mathematical Surveys, 1981, 36:1, 1–8. : an English translation of the paper .
. An interview with Vladimir Igorevich Arnol'd containing several important historical details about his teachers and other great mathematicians he knew when he was first studying and then working at the MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, including Ivan Petrowsky.
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