Mark Aronovich Naimark (; 5 December 1909 – 30 December 1978) was a Soviet mathematician who made important contributions to functional analysis and mathematical physics.
Life
Naimark was born on 5 December 1909 in Odessa, part of modern-day Ukraine, but which was then part of the Russian Empire, to a Jewish family. His father was Aron Iakovlevich Naimark, a professional artist, and his mother Zefir Moiseevna. He was four years old at the onset of World War I in 1914, and seven when the tumultuous Russian Revolution began in 1917. Showing an early talent for mathematics, Naimark enrolled in a technical college at the age of fifteen in 1924 soon after the Russian Civil War had ended. There he studied while working at a foundry until enrolling in the Physics and Mathematics faculty at Odessa Institute of National Education in 1929. He was supervised by the functional analyst Mark Krein, completing his candidate's dissertation in 1936. Krein was at the time still a young mathematician, only two years older than Naimark, but had already built a research group in functional analysis, and they worked together on some of Naimark's first works on symmetric and Hermitian forms.
After the war Naimark returned to Moscow, where he worked in various institutes, and in 1954 became a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Physico-Technical Institute of Moscow. He was appointed a professor at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in 1962, where he stayed for the remainder of his career, and supervised seven doctoral students. He had written 123 papers and five books.