Sergey Yablonsky

Sergey Vsevolodovich Yablonsky
Sergey Yablonsky
Born	(1924-12-06)6 December 1924 Moscow, Russia
Died	26 May 1998(1998-05-26) (aged 73) Moscow, Russia
Nationality	Russian
Alma mater	Moscow State University
Awards	Lenin Prize
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics and discrete mathematics
Institutions	Moscow State University Steklov Institute of Mathematics Institute of Applied Mathematics
Doctoral advisor	Nina Bari Pyotr Novikov
Doctoral students	Oleg Lupanov, Rafail Krichevskii

Sergey Vsevolodovich Yablonsky (

.

Yablonsky is credited for helping to overcome the

In Russia, a group led by Yablonsky had the idea that combinatorial problems are hard in proportion to the amount of brute-force search required to find a solution. In particular, they noticed that for many problems they could not find a useful way to organize the space of potential solutions so as to avoid brute force search. They began to suspect that these problems had an inherently unorganized solution space, and the best method for solving them would require enumerating an exponential (in the size of the problem instance) number of potential solutions. That is, the problems seem to require ${\displaystyle c^{n}}$ "shots in the dark" (for some constant ${\displaystyle c}$) when the length of the problem description is ${\displaystyle n}$. However, despite their "leading-edge" taste in mathematics, Yablonsky's group never quite formulated this idea precisely.[2]

Biography

Childhood

Yablonsky was born in

War

In August 1942, after completing his first year at Moscow State University's Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Yablonsky, then 17, went to serve in the Soviet Army, fighting in the second world war as a member of the tank brigade 242. For his service he was awarded two Orders of the Patriotic War, two Orders of the Red Star, Order of Glory of the 3rd class, and numerous medals. He returned to his study after the war has ended in 1945 and went on to graduate with distinction.

Post-war period

Yablonsky graduated the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University in 1950. During his student years he worked under supervision of Nina Bari. This collaboration resulted in his first research paper, "On the converging sequences of continuous functions" (1950).

He joined the graduate program of the

. Among the problems that were addressed in his PhD thesis titled "Issues of functional completeness in k-valued calculus" (1953) is the definitive answer to the question of completeness in 3-valued logic.

Starting from 1953, Yablonsky worked at the Department of Applied Mathematics of

(division of mathematics).

Yablonsky played an active role in the creation of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University in 1970. In 1971 he became the founding head of the department of mathematical cybernetics (initially department of automata theory and mathematical logic) at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics.^[4]

References