Aleksandr Korkin

Aleksandr Nikolaevich Korkin was a Russian mathematician, born in 1837 in the village of Zhidovinovo near Tot'ma in the Vologda region and died in St Petersburg on 1 September 1908. The son of a prosperous peasant trader who had been a serf, he won the gold medal of the Vologda gymnasium, studied at St Petersburg University under Bunyakovsky, Somov and Chebyshev, and lectured there from 1861 until the year of his death. His major contribution was to the development of partial differential equations, and with Yegor Zolotarev he wrote three papers on extremal positive definite quadratic forms, the first of which showed that a bound conjectured by Hermite was incorrect. He was known as a clear and demanding teacher whose home was open to students on what came to be called Korkin Saturdays.