mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
known in particular for his work on
almost periodic functions
In mathematics, an almost periodic function is, loosely speaking, a function of a real number that is periodic to within any desired level of accuracy, given suitably long, well-distributed "almost-periods". The concept was first studied by Haral ...
inverse scattering
In mathematics and physics, the inverse scattering problem is the problem of determining characteristics of an object, based on data of how it scatters incoming radiation or particles. It is the inverse problem to the direct scattering problem, w ...
.
Life
Boris Levitan was born in
Berdyansk
Berdiansk or Berdyansk ( uk, Бердя́нськ, translit=Berdiansk, ; russian: Бердя́нск, translit=Berdyansk ) is a port city in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast (province) in south-eastern Ukraine. It is on the northern coast of the Sea of ...
(south-eastern
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian invas ...
), and grew up in
Kharkiv
Kharkiv ( uk, wikt:Харків, Ха́рків, ), also known as Kharkov (russian: Харькoв, ), is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine.Kharkov University in 1936; in 1938, he submitted his PhD thesis "''Some Generalization of Almost Periodic Function''" under the supervision of Naum Akhiezer. Then he defended the habilitation thesis "''Theory of Generalized Translation Operators''".
He was drafted into the army at the beginning of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...
in 1941, and served until 1944. From 1944 to 1961 he worked at the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy, and from 1961 until about 1992 at Moscow University. In 1992 Levitan emigrated to the United States. During the last years of his life, he worked in the
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...