Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov (; 4 August 1912 – 27 July 1999) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and mountaineer.
Personal life
Aleksandr Aleksandrov was born in 1912 in Volyn, Ryazan Oblast. His father was a headmaster of a secondary school in St Petersburg and his mother a teacher at said school, thus the young Alekandrov spent a majority of his childhood in the city. His family was old Russian nobility—students noted ancestral portraits which hung in his office. His sisters were Soviet botanist Vera Danilovna Aleksandrov (RU) and Maria Danilovna Aleksandrova, author of the first monograph on gerontopsychology in the USSR. In 1937, he married a student of the Faculty of Physics, Marianna Leonidovna Georg. Together they had two children: Daria (b. 1948) and Daniil (RU) (b. 1957). In 1980, he married Svetlana Mikhailovna Vladimirova (née Bogacheva). In 1951 he became a member of the Communist Party.
Alekandrov had a personal love for poetry, writing and translating. Once, on a trip to London, he was received as a visiting Shakespeare scholar.
From 1964 to 1986 Aleksandrov lived in Novosibirsk, heading the Laboratory of Geometry of the Institute of Mathematics of the Siberian Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences, teaching at Novosibirsk State University. In 1986 he returned to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to head the geometry laboratory at LOMI.
Aleksandrov's main work was in the study of differential geometry and physics. His work in geometry specifically is said to be second only to Gauss by N. V. Efimov, V. A. Zalgaller and A. V. Pogorelov.
Students of Aleksandrov
- I. Liberman, S. Olovianishnikoff, P. Kostelyanetz — all the three of them died on the battlefields of World War II
- A. Pogorelov — from Kharkov
- A. Yusupov — from Bukhara
- Students from the Aleksandrov Leningrad period (ordered by the time of joining the seminars): Yu. Borisov, V. Zalgaller, Yu. Reshetnyak, I. Bakelman, Yu. Volkov, A. Zamorzaev, S. Bogacheva (who later married Aleksandrov), Yu. Borovskii, R. Pimenov
- Sobchuk and Starokhozyayev — from Ukraine
- G. Rusiyeshvili — from Georgia (country)
- B. Frank and H. Frank — from Germany
- Yu. Burago, V. Kreinovich; Grigori Perelman
- Moved from Alma-Ata after Aleksandrov's lecture tour there: M. Kvachko, V. Ovchinnikova, E. Sen'kin
- Stayed in Alma-Ata: A. Zilberberg, V. Strel'cov, D. Yusupov
- Novosibirsk students: A. Guts, A. Kuz'minykh, A. Levichev, and A. Shaidenko.
Both in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk Aleksandrov participated in joint research also with some of his students' students. Several of them became his co-authors: V. Berestovskii, A. Verner, N. Netsvetaev, I. Nikolaev, and V. Ryzhik.
His last Ph.D. student was Grigori Perelman who proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture in 2002/2003 which contains the Poincaré conjecture as a special case.
Mountaineering
Aleksandrov became attracted to alpinism under the influence of his advisor Boris Delaunay. In the summer of 1937, after defending his D.Sc.,
:…together with I. Chashnikov he makes a first climb to the Chotchi summit, and with K. Piskaryov performs a climb of Bu-Ul'gen via the western wall (one of the first wall climbs in the history of the Soviet alpinism).<br/><nowiki>[…]</nowiki> In 1940 he participates in a record-making traversal<nowiki>[…]</nowiki> He manages, almost by a miracle, to stop the fall of A. Gromov, who had fallen along with a snow shelf. It was with this traversal that Aleksandrov completed the alpinist sports master requirements. The German-Soviet War postponed awarding him this honorary title until 1949.
During his rectorship, Aleksandrov also advanced the mountaineering sport activities in the university, actively participating in the climbs.
The fiftieth birthday was celebrated by Aleksandrov in the mountains with his friends. On that day he made a solo first climb of an
: …unnamed peak 6222 m (Shakhdarinsk ridge, Pamir), that as he suggested was then named "The peak of the Leningrad university."
During later years Aleksandrov was unable to climb due to health problems, yet he never ceased dreaming of climbing. Finally, in 1982, the year of his seventieth birthday, he, together with K. Tolstov, performed in Tian Shan his last climb, of the Panfilov Peak...