Roland Dobrushin

Roland Lvovich Dobrushin (1929 to 1995) was a mathematician who made important contributions to probability theory, mathematical physics and information theory. He received his doctorate at Moscow State University under Andrey Kolmogorov. In statistical mechanics he introduced, at the same time as Lanford and Ruelle, the DLR equations that characterize a Gibbs measure. With Kotečký and Shlosman he studied how droplets form in Ising-type models, giving a mathematical justification of the Wulff construction. He was a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of Academia Europaea and of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the Dobrushin prize was established in his honour. Memorial articles in Russian Mathematical Surveys and Communications in Mathematical Physics review his work on Markov processes, mathematical physics and information theory.