Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin at the crossroads of the dramatic events of the European history of the first half of the 20th century

Abstract

Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin’s life (1883–1950) and work of this outstanding Russian mathematician, member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, coincides with a very difficult period in Russian history: two World Wars, the 1917 revolution in Russia, the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, the civil war of 1917–1922, and finally, the construction of a new type of state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This included collectivization in the agriculture and industrialization of the industry, accompanied by the mass terror that without exception affected all the strata of the Soviet society. Against the background of these dramatic events took place the proces of formation and flourishing of Luzin the scientist, the creator of one of the leading mathematical schools of the 20th century, the Moscow school of function theory, which became one of the cornerstones in the foundation of the Soviet mathematical school. Luzin’s work could be divided into two periods: the first one comprises the problems regarding the metric theory of functions, culminating in his famous dissertation Integral and Trigonometric Series (1915), and the second one that is mainly devoted to the development of problems arising from the theory of analytic sets. The underlying idea of Luzin’s research was the problem of the structure of the arithmetic continuum, which became the super task of his work.

The destiny favored the master: the complex turns of history in which he was involved did not prevent, and sometimes even favored the successful development of his research. And even the catastrophe that broke out over him in 1936 – “the case of Academician Luzin” – ended successfully for him.