Gelfond, Aleksandr Osipovich

Born Oct. 11 (24), 1906, in St. Petersburg; died Nov. 7, 1968, in Moscow. Soviet mathematician. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939). Member of the CPSU from 1940.

A graduate of Moscow University (1927), Gel’fond became a professor there in 1931. His main scientific interests were the theory of numbers and the theory of functions of a complex variable. He established profound relationships between the analytic properties of functions of a complex variable and arithmetic. Gel’fond devised analytical methods for proving the transcendence of numbers. In works written in 1929 and 1934 he solved the well-known Euler-Hilbert problem of the transcendence of the logarithms of algebraic numbers with algebraic bases and in 1949 established a series of theorems on the mutual transcendence of numbers. His best-known works in the theory of functions are those on the interpolation of entire functions and the relationship between the increase of entire functions and the arithmetical properties of their values. Gel’fond was awarded the Order of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals.