Anatoly Maltsev

Anatoly Ivanovich Maltsev (1909 to 1967), also written Malcev or Mal'cev, was a Soviet mathematician noted for his work on the decidability of various algebraic groups. Born near Moscow, he studied at Moscow State University, where he worked with Kolmogorov, and his first publications dealt with logic and model theory. He gave necessary and sufficient conditions for a semigroup to be embeddable in a group, generalized the correspondence between Lie groups and Lie algebras in what is now called the Mal'cev correspondence, and proved the undecidability of the elementary theory of finite groups and of several other classes of groups. Malcev algebras, which generalize Lie algebras, are named after him. He became an Academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1958, moved to Novosibirsk in 1960, founded the journal Algebra i Logika in 1962 and led a seminar there that started a new school in model theory. He received the Stalin Prize and the Lenin Prize.