Alexander Gelfond

Alexander Osipovich Gelfond (24 October 1906 to 7 November 1968) was a Soviet mathematician, and Gelfond's theorem, also known as the Gelfond-Schneider theorem, is named after him. Born in Saint Petersburg in the Russian Empire, the son of the physician and amateur philosopher Osip Gelfond, he entered Moscow State University in 1924 and obtained his Ph.D. there in 1930 under Aleksandr Khinchin and Vyacheslav Stepanov. In 1930 he spent five months in Germany working with Edmund Landau, Carl Ludwig Siegel and David Hilbert. From 1931 he was a professor at Moscow State University, where he worked until the last day of his life, and from 1933 he also worked at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics.