Eugene Dynkin

Eugene Borisovich Dynkin (1924 to 2014) was a Russian-born American mathematician who worked in probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups and algebras and Markov processes. Born in Leningrad, he was exiled with his family to Kazakhstan in 1935 after his father was labelled an enemy of the people, entered Moscow University at sixteen in 1940 and graduated in 1945, then became a research student of Andrey Kolmogorov. While still a student he discovered the diagram approach to classifying semisimple Lie algebras that now bears his name. He received his doctorate in 1948, held a chair at Moscow University from 1954 until 1968, and wrote the classic books Foundations of the Theory of Markov Processes and Markov Processes. He emigrated to the United States in 1976, joined Cornell University in 1977, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985 and received the Steele Prize for total mathematical work in 1993.