After graduating with honors from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv he successfully completed postgraduate studies at the NASU Institute of Mathematics with an early defense of his candidate's thesis (1961).

He is the head of the department of the Theory of dynamical systems at the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

[5][6] In the last years of his life, he worked as a chief researcher of the Department of Theory of Dynamic Systems and Fractal Analysis of the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research conducted by O. M. Sharkovsky allowed him to propose the concept of "ideal turbulence"[12][13] — a new mathematical phenomenon in deterministic systems that models the most complex properties of turbulence in time and space, namely: the processes of the formation of coherent structures of decreasing scales and the birth of random states.

gave general courses and lectures on the theory of dynamic systems at the mechanical and mathematical faculty of his native university.

[4] His last paper "Descriptive theory of determined chaos"[14] was published in the Ukrains’kyi Matematychnyi Zhurnal (Ukrainian Mathematical Journal) in January 2023 and translated in July 2023 with publication in Springer Link.