Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev

Yegor (Egor) Ivanovich Zolotarev ( _ru. Егор Иванович Золотарёв) (March 31, 1847 – July 19, 1878) was a Russian mathematician.

Yegor was born as a son of Agafya IzotovnaZolotareva and the merchant Ivan Vasilevich Zolotarev in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 1857 he began to study at the fifth St Petersburg gymnasium, a schoolwhich centred on mathematics and natural science. He finished it with thesilver medal in 1863. In the same year he was allowed to be an auditorat the physico-mathematical faculty of St Petersburguniversity.

He had not been able to become a student before 1864 becausehe was too young. Among his academic teachers were Somov, Chebyshev and
Korkin, with whom he would have a tight scientific friendship.In November 1867 he defended his Kandidat thesis "About the Integration of Gyroscope Equations", after 10 months there followed his thesis pro venia legendi "About one question on Minima".With this work he was given the right to teach as a private lecturer atSt Petersburg university.

He first lectured on differential calculus to science students (until summer 1871), later integral calculus and analysis to beginners of mathematics. Except for a short pause he lectured on elliptic functions to students of higher semesters during his whole job as lecturer and professor.

In December 1869, Zolotarev defended his master'sthesis "About the Solution of the Indefinite Equation of Third Degree x³ +Ay³ + A²z³ - 3Axyz = 1"He took his first trip abroad in 1872 and visited Berlin and Heidelberg. InBerlin he attended Weierstrass' "theory of analytic functions", in Heidelberg Koenigsberger's.In 1874, Zolotarev become a member of the university staff as a lecturer and inthe same year he defended his doctoral thesis "Theory of Complex Numberswith an Application to Integral Calculus". The problem Zolotarev solved therewas based on a problem Chebyshev had posed earlier, the representation ofexpressions of the form

:$int\; frac\{x+A\}\{sqrt\{x^4+Ax^3+bx^2+cx+d,\; dx$

by logarithms. This was a question Chebyshev had been interested in since the beginning of his research, but he was unable to solve it without the help of elliptic functions.

Starting at the beginning of the winter semester 1876 Zolotarev was appointed extraordinary professor, and after the death of academician Somov he became his successor, but only as an adjunct of the Academy of Sciences. Neverthelessthis was a remarkable fact. On the one hand there was another candidate, the ordinary professor Korkin.

Egor Ivanovich Zolotarev's steep career ended abruptly with his earlydeath on June 26 1878. He was on his way to his dacha when he was run over by a train in the Tsarskoe Selo station. On July 7 1878 he died from blood-poisoning.

ee also

* Zolotarev's lemma

External links

*MacTutor Biography|id=Zolotarev