Eugene Dynkin

Eugene Borisovich Dynkin (Russian: Евге́ний Бори́сович Ды́нкин; May 11, 1924 – 14 November 2014) was a Soviet and American mathematician. He has made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes. The Dynkin diagram, the Dynkin system, and Dynkin's lemma are named for him.

Biography

Dynkin lived in Leningrad until 1935, when his family was exiled to Kazakhstan. Two years later, when Dynkin was 13, his father disappeared in the Gulag.

Moscow University

At the age of 16, in 1940, Dynkin was admitted to Moscow University. He avoided military service in World War II because of his poor eyesight, and received his M.S. in 1945 and his Ph.D. in 1948. He became an assistant professor at Moscow, but was not awarded a "chair" until 1954 because of his political undesirability. His academic progress was made difficult due to his father's fate, as well as Dynkin's Jewish origin; the special efforts of Andrey Kolmogorov, his Ph.D. supervisor, made it possible for Dynkin to progress through graduate school into a teaching position.