Sergey Yablonsky
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 Photographer unknown |
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| Born | December 6, 1924 Moscow, Russia |
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| Died | May 26, 1998 Moscow, Russia |
| Residence | Soviet Union Russia |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Field | Mathematics and Discrete Mathematics |
| Institution | Moscow State University Steklov Institute of Mathematics |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University |
| Academic advisor | Nina Karlovna Bari Pyotr Sergeyevich Novikov |
| Notable students | Oleg Borisovich Lupanov |
Sergey Vsevolodovich Yablonsky (Russian: Серге́й Все́володович Ябло́нский, December 6, 1924 – May 26, 1998) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, one of the founders of the Soviet school of Mathematical Cybernetics and Discrete Mathematics. He is the author of a number of classic results on synthesis, reliability, and classification of control systems (Russian: Управляющие системы), the term used in the USSR and Russia for a generalization of finite state automata, Boolean circuits and multi-valued logic circuits. (The term is ambiguous, since conventionally in the West Control systems is understood as an Engineering discipline. The ambiguity stems from the fact that the names of the two disciplines that differ in Russian, namely Системы управления and Управляющие системы, are both translated into English as Control systems.)
S. V. Yablonsky is credited for helping to overcome the pressure from Communist ideologists against the term and the discipline of Cybernetics and establishing what in the Soviet Union was called Mathematical Cybernetics as a separate field of mathematics. Yablonsky and his students were ones of the first in the world to raise the issues of potentially inherent unavoidability of the brute force search for some problems, the precursor of the P vs NP problem, though Gödel's letter to von Neumann dated 20 March, 1956 and discovered in 1988 may have preceded them[1].
In Russia, a group led by Yablonsky had the idea that combinatorial problems are hard in proportion to the amount of brute-force search required to find a solution. In particular, they noticed that for many problems they could not find a useful way to organize the space of potential solutions so as to avoid brute force search. They began to suspect that these problems had an inherently unorganized solution space, and the best method for solving them would require enumerating an exponential (in the size of the problem instance) number of potential solutions. That is, the problems seem to require cn "shots in the dark" (for some constant c) when the length of the problem description is n. However, despite their "leading-edge" taste in mathematics, Yablonsky's group never quite formulated this idea precisely.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Childhood
S. V. Yablonsky was born in Moscow, to the family of professor of Mechanics. His mathematical talents became apparent in early age. In 1940 he became the winner of the sixth Moscow secondary school mathematical olympiad [3].
[edit] War
In August of 1942, after completing his first year at Moscow State University's Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics S.V. Yablonsky, then 17, went to serve in the Soviet Army as a member of a tank brigade. He returned to his study after the war has ended in 1945 and went on to graduate with distinction.
[edit] Post-war period
S. V. Yablonsky actively contributed to the creating of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University in 1970. In 1971 he created and became a head of the Chair of Mathematical Cybernetics (initially Chair of Automata Theory and Mathematical Logic) at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics.
[edit] References
- ^ Sipser, M. (1992), The history and status of the P versus NP question, in ‘Proceedings of the 24th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing’, pp. 603–618.
- ^ Computational Complexity Theory (2004), Steven Rudich, Avi Widgerson, Editors, American Mathematical Society, page 12.
- ^ История информатики в России. Ученые и их школы. Сергей Всеволодович Яблонский (2003) [1], Валерий Борисович Алексеев, Nauka Publishers, page 241.
