Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Russian: Андре́й Никола́евич Колмого́ров, IPA: [ɐnˈdrʲej nʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪtɕ kəlmɐˈɡorəf] ⓘ, 25 April 1903 – 20 October 1987)[4][5] was a Soviet mathematician who played a central role in the creation of modern probability theory.

He also contributed to the mathematics of topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory and computational complexity.

Katayev had been exiled from Saint Petersburg to the Yaroslavl province after his participation in the revolutionary movement against the tsars.

Kolmogorov's first mathematical discovery was published in this journal: at the age of five he noticed the regularity in the sum of the series of odd numbers:

While an undergraduate student in college, he attended the seminars of the Russian historian S. V. Bakhrushin, and he published his first research paper on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries' landholding practices in the Novgorod Republic.

[3] He formed a lifelong close friendship with Pavel Alexandrov, a fellow student of Luzin; indeed, several researchers have concluded that the two friends were sexually involved,[15][16][17][18] although neither acknowledged this openly.

In 1929, Kolmogorov and Alexandrov during a long travel stayed about a month in an island in lake Sevan in Armenia.

He had various scientific contacts in Göttingen, first with Richard Courant and his students working on limit theorems, where diffusion processes proved to be the limits of discrete random processes, then with Hermann Weyl in intuitionistic logic, and lastly with Edmund Landau in function theory.

Luzin lost his academic positions, but curiously he was neither arrested nor expelled from the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

[20][21] The question of whether Kolmogorov and others were coerced into testifying against their teacher remains a topic of considerable speculation among historians; all parties involved refused to publicly discuss the case for the rest of their lives.

Soviet-Russian mathematician Semën Samsonovich Kutateladze concluded in 2013, after reviewing archival documents made available during the 1990s and other surviving testimonies, that the students of Luzin had initiated the accusations against Luzin out of personal acrimony; there was no definitive evidence that the students were coerced by the state, nor was there any definitive evidence to support their allegations of academic misconduct.

During World War II Kolmogorov contributed to the Soviet war effort by applying statistical theory to artillery fire, developing a scheme of stochastic distribution of barrage balloons intended to help protect Moscow from German bombers during the Battle of Moscow.

At Moscow State University, Kolmogorov occupied different positions including the heads of several departments: probability, statistics, and random processes; mathematical logic.

In his later years, he devoted much of his effort to the mathematical and philosophical relationship between probability theory in abstract and applied areas.

Vladimir Arnold once said: "Kolmogorov – Poincaré – Gauss – Euler – Newton, are only five lives separating us from the source of our science."