Sergei Novikov

Sergei Petrovich Novikov (1938 to 2024) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician noted for work in algebraic topology and soliton theory. Born in Gorky, he grew up in a family of mathematicians; his father Pyotr Novikov gave a negative solution to the word problem for groups. He studied at Moscow State University and took his candidate degree in 1964 under Mikhail Postnikov. His early work on cobordism adapted the Adams spectral sequence to generalised cohomology theories, giving the Adams-Novikov spectral sequence, and he was a pioneer of surgery theory for high-dimensional manifolds, proved the topological invariance of rational Pontryagin classes and posed the Novikov conjecture. He later worked on isospectral flows and theta functions. He received the Lenin Prize in 1967, became the first Soviet mathematician to win the Fields Medal in 1970 and received the Wolf Prize in 2005. He later worked at the University of Maryland.