Mark Naimark

Mark Aronovich Naimark was a Ukrainian mathematician who worked in functional analysis and mathematical physics. He was born in Odessa in 1909, studied university mathematics largely on his own while working in a foundry, and did graduate work at Odessa State University under Mark Krein, defending his candidate dissertation on normal operators in Hilbert space in 1936. He moved to Moscow in 1938 and took his doctorate at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in 1941. His collaboration with Israel Gelfand produced the Gelfand-Naimark theorem of 1943 on self-adjoint algebras of operators in Hilbert space, and their 1950 treatise on unitary representations of the classical groups. He also generalised von Neumann's spectral theorem to locally compact abelian groups and wrote the monographs Linear differential operators, Normed Rings and a book on representations of the Lorentz group. After years of discrimination he became a professor at the Steklov Institute in 1962 and held the post until his death in Moscow in 1978.