Aleksei Parshin

Aleksei Nikolaevich Parshin, born on 7 November 1942 in Sverdlovsk and died on 18 June 2022, was a Russian mathematician who specialized in arithmetic geometry. He graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University in 1964, earned his first doctorate at the Steklov Institute in 1968 under Igor Shafarevich, and received the higher doctorate from Moscow State University in 1983. He spent his career at the Steklov Institute, heading its Department of Algebra from 1995. He is best known for his part in the proof of the Mordell conjecture: in his 1968 thesis he showed, by an argument known as Parshin's trick, that the conjecture follows from Shafarevich's finiteness conjecture, and Gerd Faltings completed the program in 1983. He also worked on higher-dimensional class field theory and integrable systems, edited Hilbert's and Weyl's works in Russian, and wrote on Russian religious philosophy. He was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2011.