Mikhail Yakovlevich Suslin

Mikhail Yakovlevich Suslin (Russian: Михаи́л Я́ковлевич Су́слин; Krasavka, Saratov Oblast, November 15, 1894 – 1919) (sometimes transliterated Souslin) was a Russian mathematician who made major contributions to the fields of general topology and descriptive set theory.

His name is especially associated to Suslin's problem, a question relating to totally ordered sets that was eventually found to be independent of the standard system of set-theoretic axioms, ZFC.

He contributed greatly to the theory of analytic sets, sometimes called after him, a kind of a set of reals which is definable via trees. In fact, while he was a research student of Nikolai Luzin (in 1917) he found an error in an argument of Lebesgue, who believed he had proved that for any Borel set in $\R^2$, the projection onto the real axis was also a Borel set.

Suslin died of typhus in the 1919 Moscow epidemic following the Russian Civil War.

References

• Igoshin, V I (1996), "A short biography of Mikhail Yakovlevich Suslin", Russ. Math. Surv. 51 (3): 371–383, doi:10.1070/RM1996v051n03ABEH002905 
• Akihiro Kanamori, Tenenbaum and Set theory, p. 2, http://math.bu.edu/people/aki/18.pdf 

Persondata
Name	Suslin
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	November 15, 1894
Place of birth
Date of death	1919
Place of death