Yuri Smirnov

Yuri Mikhailovich Smirnov (Юрий Михайлович Смирнов, September 19, 1921, Kaluga – September 3, 2007, Moscow) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, specializing in topology. Biography Yuri M. Smirnov was born in a family of clerical employees. His mother was imprisoned in 1937 for anti-Soviet activity and, as later revealed, was executed by gun shot. While studying at school, Yuri M. Smirnov was interested in mathematics and astronomy and after completing undergraduate study in 1939 entered the astronomy department of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. However, soon under the influence of A. N. Kolmogorov, he transferred to the mathematical department of the same Faculty. After his second year of undergraduate study, Smirnov went in autumn 1941 to the front and served as a radio operator in the Northern Fleet until the end of WW II. After demobilization in 1945, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University and began to participate in the seminars of the famous topologist P. S. Alexandrov. In 1948 Smirnov graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics and entered the graduate school of the same faculty, at the same time starting to work as a junior researcher at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. In 1951 he defended his Ph.D. (Russian Candidate of Sciences) thesis О топологических пространствах, компактных в данном отрезке мощностей (On topological spaces, compact in a given interval of cardinalities), which was supervised by P. S. Alexandrov. In 1957 Smirnov received his Russian Doctor of Sciences degree with thesis Исследование по общей и равномерной топологии методом покрытий (Investigation of general and uniform topology by the covering method). From 1945 until the end of his life he worked at the Department of Higher Geometry and Topology of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, from 1953 as an associate professor, and from 1958 as a full professor. He taught courses on analytical geometry, linear algebra and topology, linear algebra and geometry, differential geometry and topology, and the theories of retracts, shapes, and equivariant compactifications.