Yegor Ivanovich Zolotarev
Encyclopedia
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
– July 19, 1878, Saint Petersburg) was a Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
.
Biography
Yegor was born as a son of Agafya Izotovna Zolotareva and the merchant Ivan Vasilevich Zolotarev in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia.In 1857 he began to study at the fifth St Petersburg gymnasium
Gymnasium (school)
A gymnasium is a type of school providing secondary education in some parts of Europe, comparable to English grammar schools or sixth form colleges and U.S. college preparatory high schools. The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, meaning a locality for both physical and intellectual...
, a school which centred on mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
and natural science
Natural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
. He finished it with the silver medal in 1863. In the same year he was allowed to be an auditor at the physico-mathematical faculty of St Petersburg university
Saint Petersburg State University
Saint Petersburg State University is a Russian federal state-owned higher education institution based in Saint Petersburg and one of the oldest and largest universities in Russia....
.
He had not been able to become a student before 1864 because he was too young. Among his academic teachers were Somov, Chebyshev
Pafnuty Chebyshev
Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was a Russian mathematician. His name can be alternatively transliterated as Chebychev, Chebysheff, Chebyshov, Tschebyshev, Tchebycheff, or Tschebyscheff .-Early years:One of nine children, Chebyshev was born in the village of Okatovo in the district of Borovsk,...
and Korkin, with whom he would have a tight scientific friendship.
In November 1867 he defended his Kandidat
Kandidat
The Candidate of Sciences degree is a first post-graduate scientific degree in some former Eastern Bloc countries, such as Russia and Ukraine, which is awarded for original research that constitutes a significant contribution to a scientific field. The degree was first introduced in the USSR on...
thesis “About the Integration of Gyroscope Equations”, after 10 months there followed his thesis pro venia legendi About one question on Minima. With this work he was given the right to teach as a private lecturer at St Petersburg university.
He first lectured on differential calculus
Differential calculus
In mathematics, differential calculus is a subfield of calculus concerned with the study of the rates at which quantities change. It is one of the two traditional divisions of calculus, the other being integral calculus....
to science students (until summer 1871), later integral calculus and analysis to beginners of mathematics. Except for a short pause he lectured on elliptic function
Elliptic function
In complex analysis, an elliptic function is a function defined on the complex plane that is periodic in two directions and at the same time is meromorphic...
s to students of higher semesters during his whole job as lecturer and professor.
In December 1869, Zolotarev defended his master's thesis “About the Solution of the Indefinite Equation of Third Degree x³ + Ay³ + A²z³ - 3Axyz = 1”.
He took his first trip abroad in 1872 and visited Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and Heidelberg
Heidelberg
-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...
. In
Berlin he attended Weierstrass
Karl Weierstrass
Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass was a German mathematician who is often cited as the "father of modern analysis".- Biography :Weierstrass was born in Ostenfelde, part of Ennigerloh, Province of Westphalia....
' "theory of analytic functions", in Heidelberg Koenigsberger's.
In 1874, Zolotarev become a member of the university staff as a lecturer and in
the same year he defended his doctoral thesis “Theory of Complex Numbers with an Application to Integral Calculus”. The problem Zolotarev solved there
was based on a problem Chebyshev had posed earlier, the representation of
expressions of the form
by logarithms. This was a question Chebyshev had been interested in since the beginning of his research, but he was unable to solve it without the help of elliptic functions.
Starting at the beginning of the winter semester 1876 Zolotarev was appointed extraordinary professor, and after the death of academician Somov he became his successor as an adjunct of the Academy of Sciences.
Egor Ivanovich Zolotarev's steep career ended abruptly with his early death. He was on his way to his dacha
Dacha
Dacha is a Russian word for seasonal or year-round second homes often located in the exurbs of Soviet and post-Soviet cities. Cottages or shacks serving as family's main or only home are not considered dachas, although many purpose-built dachas are recently being converted for year-round residence...
when he was run over by a train in the Tsarskoe Selo station. On July 19, 1878 he died from blood poisoning.