Eugene Dynkin

Eugene Borisovich Dynkin (Russian: Евгений Борисович Дынкин; 11 May 1924 – 14 November 2014) was a Soviet and American mathematician.

He avoided military service in World War II because of his poor eyesight, and received his MS in 1945 and his PhD in 1948.

[3] In 1968, Dynkin was forced to transfer from the Moscow University to the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

[7] Dynkin is considered to be a rare example of a mathematician who made fundamental contributions to two very distinct areas of mathematics: algebra and probability theory.

In 1944, Gelfand asked him to prepare a survey on the structure and classification of semisimple Lie groups, based on the papers by Hermann Weyl and Bartel Leendert van der Waerden.

What he accomplished in this paper was to take a hitherto esoteric subject, and to make it into beautiful and powerful mathematics.Dynkin's 1952 influential paper "Semisimple subalgebras of semisimple Lie algebras", contained large tables and lists, and studied the subalgebras of the exceptional Lie algebras.

Eugene Dynkin, 1976