Mikhail Postnikov

Mikhail Mikhailovich Postnikov (1927 to 2004) was a Soviet mathematician who worked in algebraic and differential topology. Born in Shatura and raised in Perm, he entered Perm University at fourteen, moved to Moscow State University in 1943 and graduated in 1945. Lev Pontryagin supervised his senior thesis and his candidate's degree, awarded in 1949. At the Steklov Institute he carried out the early 1950s work on the homotopy classification of polyhedra and their maps, which J. H. C. Whitehead called the greatest achievement in algebraic topology in recent years and which earned him the Lenin Prize in 1961. He later taught at Moscow State University, directed a research seminar there and shaped the teaching of algebraic topology in the USSR through textbooks on Galois theory, Morse theory, Lie groups, algebraic numbers and differential geometry. He also kept a large collection of puzzles and games and wrote on education reform.