Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin


Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin was a Soviet mathematician, who made numerous contributions in algebraic topology, geometry, measure theory, probability theory, ergodic theory and entropy theory.

Life

Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, to a wealthy family. His mother, Henrietta Emmanuilovna Levenson, had studied medicine in France. His maternal grandmother, Clara Levenson, had been one of the first female doctors in Russia. His maternal grandfather Emmanuil Levenson was a wealthy businessman. Vladimir Rokhlin's father Abram Veniaminovich Rokhlin was a well-known social democrat.
Vladimir Rokhlin entered Moscow State University in 1935. His advisor was Abraham Plessner. He volunteered for the army in 1941, leading to four years as a prisoner of a German war camp, and then two years in a Soviet "verification camp" after the end of the war on suspicion of being a German or/and Western spy. Due to intercession by Andrey Kolmogorov and Lev Pontryagin, he was released in December 1946 and allowed to return to Moscow, after which he returned to mathematics.
In 1959 Rokhlin joined Leningrad State University as a faculty member. He died in 1984 in Leningrad. His students include Viatcheslav Kharlamov, Yakov Eliashberg, Mikhail Gromov, Nikolai V. Ivanov, Anatoly Vershik and Oleg Viro.

Work

Rokhlin's contributions to topology include Rokhlin's theorem, a result of 1952 on the signature of 4-manifolds. He also worked in the theory of characteristic classes, homotopy theory, cobordism theory, and in the topology of real algebraic varieties.
In measure theory, Rokhlin introduced what are now called Rokhlin partitions. He introduced the notion of standard probability space, and characterised such spaces up to isomorphism mod 0. He also proved the famous Rokhlin lemma.

Family

His son Vladimir Rokhlin, Jr. is a well-known mathematician and computer scientist at Yale University.
Rokhlin's uncle was Korney Chukovsky, a well-known Russian poet, most famous for his popular children's books.