Anatole Katok

Anatole Borisovich Katok (Anatoly Borisovich Katok in Russian), born on 9 August 1944 and died on 30 April 2018, was an American mathematician of Russian-Jewish origin who worked on the theory of dynamical systems. He took his master's degree in 1965 and his doctorate in 1968 at Moscow State University under Yakov Sinai, emigrated to the United States in 1978, and taught at the University of Maryland, Caltech and from 1990 Pennsylvania State University, where he directed the Center for Dynamics and Geometry and advised forty-four doctoral students. With Anatoly Stepin he developed the theory of periodic approximations of measure-preserving transformations, and he also contributed monotone equivalence, the Anosov-Katok construction, and work on rigidity and on non-uniformly hyperbolic systems. He made progress on the Littlewood conjecture with Elon Lindenstrauss and Manfred Einsiedler, and the Katok entropy conjecture is named for him. With Boris Hasselblatt he wrote the widely cited Introduction to the Modern Theory of Dynamical Systems. He founded the Journal of Modern Dynamics as its editor in chief.