Nikolai Luzin

Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin (1883 to 1950) was a Russian mathematician who made important contributions to the foundations of mathematics, measure theory and topology. Born in Irkutsk to a father who was half Russian and half Buryat, he moved to Moscow in 1901 and entered Moscow University. He was at first an average student, but his teacher Dmitri Egorov recognised his talent and supervised his master's thesis. After a personal crisis and study abroad, including time in Gottingen, he completed a thesis on the integral and trigonometric series in 1915. With Egorov he built a research group at Moscow University that the students called Luzitania; its early members included Aleksandrov, Suslin, Menshov and Khinchin, followed by Urysohn and Kolmogorov. In 1936 he became the target of a political campaign in the Soviet press.