Sergei Novikov

Sergei Novikov (born March 20, 1938, Gorky, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia]—died June 6, 2024) was a Russian mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970 for his work in topology.

Novikov graduated from Moscow State University in 1960 and received Ph.D. (1964) and Doctor of Science (1965) degrees from the V.A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow. He joined the faculty at Moscow in 1964 and became head of the mathematics department at the L.D. Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in 1975. In 1983 he became head of the mathematics department at the Steklov Institute.

Novikov was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice, France, in 1970. One of his most impressive contributions in the field of topology was his work on foliations—decompositions of manifolds into smaller ones, called leaves. Leaves can be either open or closed, but at the time Novikov started his work it was not known whether leaves of a closed type existed. Novikov’s demonstration of the existence of closed leaves in the case of a three-sphere led to a good deal of additional work in the field. In 1965 he proved the topological invariance of the rational Pontryagin class of differentiable manifolds. He also attacked problems in cohomology and homotopy of Thom spaces of manifolds with striking results. In later years Novikov’s work attempted to build bridges between theoretical physics and modern mathematics, particularly in solitons and spectral theory. In addition, he made contributions to algebraic geometry.

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Novikov’s other awards included the Wolf Prize (2005), which he shared with Gregory Margulis. Novikov was cited “for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to algebraic and differential topology on one hand, and to mathematical physics on the other hand.” His publications included, with B.A. Dubrovin and A.T. Fomenko, Sovremennaya geometriya: metody i prilozheniya (1979; Modern Geometry: Methods and Applications) and, with A.T. Fomenko, Elementi differentsialnoy geometrii i topologii (1987; Basic Elements of Differential Geometry and Topology).