Nikolai Kapitonovich Nikolski

Nikolai Kapitonovich Nikolski (Николай Капитонович Никольский, sometimes transliterated as Nikolskii, born 16 November 1940) is a Russian mathematician, specializing in real and complex analysis and functional analysis.

In 1966, Nikolski earned his Candidate of Sciences degree (PhD) from the Leningrad State University under Viktor Khavin with thesis Invariant subspaces of certain compact operators (title translated from Russian). In 1973 he received his Doctor of Sciences degree (habilitation) published as monograph (VI) below. He was a Laboratory director (of Math Analysis) at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Leningrad and Professor of Department of Mathematics at Leningrad State University. In 1991 he became a professor at the University of Bordeaux.

Nikolski's research deals with operator theory, harmonic analysis, and complex analysis. He has published more than 100 papers and six research monographs.

He was an Invited Speaker with talk What problems do spectral theory and functional analysis solve for each other? at the ICM in 1978 in Helsinki. In 2010, he was awarded the Ampère Prize of the French Academy of Sciences, and in 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, as well as for several temporary positions as Fellow of the Advanced Study Institute at Indiana University (Bloomington, 1988), Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Ben-Gurion University (Israel, 1993), MSRI Research grant (Berkeley, 1995), Marie Curie Action Senior Fellow, TODEQ Project, 2008, Taussky-Todd Distinguished Professor, Caltech (Pasadena, 2015).

His doctoral students (total 26) include Alexander Borichev, Nikolai Makarov, Sergei Treil, Vasily Vasyunin, Alexander Volberg.

Among his notable contributions, Nikolski was one of the Leningrad mathematicians who in 1984 verified the correctness of the proof of the Bieberbach conjecture by Louis de Branges.