Pontryagin, Lev Semyonovich

Lev Semyonovich Pontryagin, also spelled Lev Semenovich Pontriagin, or Pontrjagin, (born September 3, 1908, Moscow—died May 3, 1988, Moscow), Russian mathematician, noted for contributions to topology, algebra, and dynamical systems.

Pontryagin lost his eyesight as the result of an explosion when he was about 14 years old. His mother became his tutor, describing mathematical symbols as they appeared to her, since she did not know their meaning or names. Entering Moscow State University in 1925, he soon became friends with Pavel Aleksandrov, who was developing point-set and combinatorial topology. Under Aleksandrov’s influence, Pontryagin spent most of the 1930s and ’40s investigating topology; his papers were collected and published as Topological Groups, which has been translated into several languages. In 1931 he was one of five signers of the Declaration on the Reorganization of the Moscow Mathematical Society, in which the signers pledged themselves to work to bring the organization in line with the policies of the Communist Party. He served for many years as a department chair at Moscow State University and as editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal Matematicheskii Sbornik (published in English as Sbornik: Mathematics).

In 1934 Pontryagin garnered international attention with his partial solution of one of David Hilbert’s famous set of 23 problems, which had challenged mathematicians since 1900. About this time he began studying control theory, work that led to his fundamental monograph, Theory of Optimal Processes (1961; English translation 1962). In later years he wrote several other expository works on mathematics.

Pontryagin was showered with honours by the Soviet government and its Academy of Sciences, including four Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, and the Lobachevsky Prize.