Pavel Aleksandrov

Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov, sometimes romanized Paul Alexandroff (7 May 1896 – 16 November 1982), was a Soviet mathematician. He wrote about three hundred papers, making important contributions to set theory and topology. In topology, the Alexandroff compactification and the Alexandrov topology are named after him. Biography Alexandrov attended Moscow State University where he was a student of Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin. Together with Pavel Urysohn, he visited the University of Göttingen in 1923 and 1924. After getting his Ph.D. in 1927, he continued to work at Moscow State University and also joined the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. He was made a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1953. Personal life Luzin challenged Alexandrov to determine if the continuum hypothesis is true. This still unsolved problem was too much for Alexandrov and he had a creative crisis at the end of 1917. The failure was a heavy blow for Alexandrov: "It became clear to me that the work on the continuum problem ended in a serious disaster. I also felt that I could no longer move on to mathematics and, so to speak, to the next tasks, and that some decisive turning point must come in my life."