Odessa Reminiscences

Abstract

I remember how during one of my visits to Odessa in the mid fifties M.G. Krein and myself were out walking when we met V.P. Potapov with his wife. Mark Gregorievich introduced us. I already knew about V.P. Potapov and his achievements from Krein who considered him to be one of his most brilliant students of whom he was proud. Krein told me about Potapov's second doctoral thesis which he had defended not long before in the Steklov Institute in Moscow. The thesis was about multiplicative decomposition of contractive matrix functions and he considered the results to be fundamental, innovative and opening a new area of research. At that time Potapov was the Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Odessa Pedagogical Institute and M.G. spoke of him with great respect.KeywordsDoctoral ThesisOperator TheorySteklov InstituteGreat RespectMultiplicative DecompositionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.