Sergei Sobolev

Sergei Lvovich Sobolev (1908 to 1989) was a Soviet mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis and partial differential equations. He introduced ideas that are now fundamental to several areas of mathematics: Sobolev spaces and their embedding theorems are a central subject in functional analysis, and in 1935 he introduced generalized functions, later known as distributions, to treat weak solutions, a theory that Laurent Schwartz developed further. Born in St. Petersburg, he studied at Leningrad University, graduating in 1929, and later worked at the Steklov Mathematical Institute and as a professor at Moscow State University. He took part in the Soviet atomic bomb project, led with Nikolay Brusentsov the development of the ternary computer Setun in 1958, and founded the Institute of Mathematics at Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk, which now bears his name.