N. N. Luzin at the Crossroads of the Events in European History of the First Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

A prominent Russian mathematician Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin (1883– 1950) lived in a very difficult period of Russian history: two world wars, two 1917 revolutions in Russia, the Bolsheviks’ coming to power, the Civil War of 1917–1922, and the construction of a new type of state, accompanied by mass terror that impacted all the strata of Soviet society. It was against the backdrop of these dramatic events that the process of Luzin’s formation and flourishing as a scientist and founder of one of the leading mathematical schools of the 20th century, the Moscow school of function theory that became one of the cornerstones in the foundation of the Soviet mathematical school, took place. Two periods can be distinguished in Luzin’s work: the first period was devoted to the problems of the metric theory of functions and culminated in his famous dissertation “The Integral and the Trigonometric Series” (1915), and the second period was mainly devoted to the development of problems in the theory of analytic sets. The implication of Luzin’s research was the problem of the structure of the arithmetic continuum that became the ultimate purpose of his work. Fortune favored the scientist: the complicated turns of history he happened to be involved in did not hinder, and sometimes even facilitated, the successful development of his studies. Even the catastrophe that descended upon him in 1936, “the case of Academician Luzin,” even though it had put an end to the normal development of his creative thought, ended with a smoothest possible outcome for him.