Anatoli Vitushkin

Anatoli Georgievich Vitushkin (1931 to 2004) was a Russian mathematician best known for work on analytic capacity, approximation theory and complex analysis. Born in Moscow, he trained at the Tula Suvorov Military School, where an accident in 1946 cost him his sight, and went on to Moscow State University, graduating with honours in 1954 and becoming a postgraduate student of Andrei Kolmogorov. While still an undergraduate he contributed to Hilbert's thirteenth problem, producing results on the impossibility of expressing smooth functions of several variables by superpositions of smooth functions of fewer variables. He worked at the Institute of Applied Mathematics on the mathematical side of the space programme, moved to the Steklov Mathematical Institute in 1965 and became a professor at Moscow State University in 1971, directing its complex analysis seminar. A criterion for uniform approximation of holomorphic functions by rational functions bears his name, and he gave a plenary lecture at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver.