Anatoly Karatsuba

Anatoly Alexeyevich Karatsuba (1937 to 2008) was a Russian mathematician who worked in analytic number theory, p-adic numbers and Dirichlet series. Born in Grozny, he spent most of his student and professional life at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, defended his D.Sc. there in 1966 on the method of trigonometric sums, and later held a position at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. As a student he attended Andrey Kolmogorov's seminar, where his solution of a problem on the length of experiments identifying the state of a finite automaton led to what is now called the Moore-Karatsuba theorem. He is best known for the Karatsuba algorithm, the earliest known divide and conquer method for multiplying numbers, and he developed a p-adic method for estimating trigonometric sums, with applications to the Waring problem and to the distribution of zeros of the Riemann zeta function. His textbook Foundations of Analytic Number Theory appeared in two editions.