He was born in Kholmech [ru], Rechytsa District, Minsk Governorate (in present-day Belarus) on 23 April 1908; Mikhlin (1968) himself states in his resume that his father was a merchant, but this assertion could be untrue since, in that period, people sometimes lied on the profession of parents in order to overcome political limitations in the access to higher education. According to a different version, his father was a melamed, at a primary religious school (kheder), and that the family was of modest means: according to the same source, Zalman was the youngest of five children.[citation needed] His first wife was Victoria Isaevna Libina: Mikhlin's book (Mikhlin 1965) is dedicated to her memory. She died of peritonitis in 1961 during a boat trip on Volga. In 1940 they adopted a son, Grigory Zalmanovich Mikhlin, who later emigrated to Haifa, Israel. His second wife was Eugenia Yakovlevna Rubinova, born in 1918, who was his companion for the rest of his life.
He graduated from a secondary school in Gomel in 1923 and entered the State Herzen Pedagogical Institute in 1925. [citation needed] In 1927 he was transferred to the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University as a second year student, passing all the exams of the first year without attending lectures.[citation needed] Among his university professors there were Nikolai Maximovich Günther and Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov. The latter became his master thesis supervisor: the topic of the thesis was the convergence of double series,[3] and was defended in 1929. Sergei Lvovich Sobolev studied in the same class as Mikhlin. In 1930 he started his teaching career, working in some Leningrad institutes for short periods, as Mikhlin himself records on the document (Mikhlin 1968). In 1932 he got a position at the Seismological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he worked till 1941: in 1935 he got the degree "Doktor nauk" in Mathematics and Physics, without having to earn the "kandidat nauk" degree, and finally in 1937 he was promoted to the rank of professor. During World War II he became professor at the Kazakh University in Alma Ata. Since 1944 S.G. Mikhlin has been professor at the Leningrad State University. From 1964 to 1986 he headed the Laboratory of Numerical Methods at the Research Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of the same university: since 1986 until his death he was a senior researcher at that laboratory.
He lived in one of the most difficult periods of contemporary Russian history. The state of mathematical sciences during this period is well described by Lorentz (2002): marxist ideology rise in the USSR universities and Academia was one of the main themes of that period. Local administrators and communist party functionaries interfered with scientists on either ethnical or ideological grounds. As a matter of fact, during the war and during the creation of a new academic system, Mikhlin did not experience the same difficulties as younger Soviet scientists of Jewish origin: for example he was included in the Soviet delegation in 1958, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh.[5] However, Fichera (1994, pp. 56–60), examining the life of Mikhlin, finds it surprisingly similar to the life of Vito Volterra under the fascist regime. He notes that antisemitism in communist countries took different forms compared to his nazist counterpart: the communist regime aimed not to the brutal homicide of Jews, but imposed on them a number of constrictions, sometimes very cruel, in order to make their life difficult. During the period from 1963 to 1981, he met Mikhlin attending several conferences in the Soviet Union, and realised how he was in a state of isolation, almost marginalized inside his native community: Fichera describes several episodes revealing this fact.[6] Perhaps, the most illuminating one is the election of Mikhlin as a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: in June 1981, Solomon G. Mikhlin was elected Foreign Member of the class of mathematical and physical sciences of the Lincei. At first time, he was proposed as a winner of the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize, but the almost sure confiscation of the prize by the Soviet authorities induced the Lincei members to elect him as a member: they decided to honour him in a way that no political authority could alienate.[7] However, Mikhlin was not allowed to visit Italy by the Soviet authorities,[8] so Fichera and his wife brought the tiny golden lynx, the symbol of the Lincei membership, directly to Mikhlin's apartment in Leningrad on 17 October 1981: the only guests to that "ceremony" were Vladimir Maz'ya and his wife Tatyana Shaposhnikova.
They just have power, but we have theorems. Therefore we are stronger!
According to Fichera (1994, pp. 60–61), which refers a conversation with Mark Vishik and Olga Oleinik, on 29 August 1990 Mikhlin left home to buy medicines for his wife Eugenia. On a public transport, he suffered a lethal stroke. He had no documents with him, therefore he was identified only some time after his death: this may be the cause of the difference in the death date reported on several biographies and obituary notices.[9] Fichera also writes that Mikhlin's wife Eugenia survived him only a few months.
Work
Research activity
He was author of monographs and textbooks which become classics for their style. His research is devoted mainly to the following fields.[10]
This classification is useful since enables one to develop computational methods adjusted in order to diminish the errors of each particular type, following the divide et impera (divide and rule) principle.
Mikhlin, S.G. (1957), Integral equations and their applications to certain problems in mechanics, mathematical physics and technology, International Series of Monographs in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 5, Oxford–London–Edinburgh–New York–Paris–Frankfurt: Pergamon Press, pp. XII+338, Zbl0077.09903. The book of Mikhlin summarizing his results in the plane elasticity problem: according to Fichera (1994, pp. 55–56) this is a widely known monograph in the theory of integral equations.
Mikhlin, S.G. (1964), Variational methods in mathematical physics, International Series of Monographs in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 50, Oxford–London–Edinburgh–New York–Paris–Frankfurt: Pergamon Press, pp. XXXII+584, Zbl0119.19002.
Mikhlin, S.G. (1965), Multidimensional singular integrals and integral equations, International Series of Monographs in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 83, Oxford–London–Edinburgh–New York–Paris–Frankfurt: Pergamon Press, pp. XII+255, MR0185399, Zbl0129.07701. A masterpiece in the multidimensional theory of singular integrals and singular integral equations summarizing all the results from the beginning to the year of publication, and also sketching the history of the subject.
Mikhlin, S.G. (1991), Error analysis in numerical processes, Pure and Applied Mathematics. A Wiley-Interscience Series of Text Monographs & Tracts, vol. 1237, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, p. 283, ISBN978-0-471-92133-2, MR1129889, Zbl0786.65038. This book summarize the contributions of Mikhlin and of the former Soviet school of numerical analysis to the problem of error analysis in numerical solutions of various kind of equations: it was also reviewed by Stummel (1993, pp. 204–206) for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.
Mikhlin, Solomon G. (1952b), "A theorem in operator theory and its application to the theory of elastic shells", Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR, novaya Seriya (in Russian), 84: 909–912, Zbl0048.42401.
Mikhlin, Solomon G. (1956a), "The theory of multidimensional singular integral equations", Vestnik Leningradskogo Universiteta, Seriya Matematika, Mekhanika, Astronomija (in Russian), 11 (1): 3–24, Zbl0075.11402.
Mikhlin, S.G. (1974), "On a method for the approximate solution of integral equations", Vestn. Leningr. Univ., Ser. Mat. Mekh. Astron. (in Russian), 13 (3): 26–33, Zbl0308.45014.
^ abSee the section "Death" for a description of the circumstances and for the probable reason of discrepancies between the death date reported by different biographical sources.
^A part of this thesis is probably reproduced in his paper (Michlin 1932), where he thanks his master Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov but does not acknowledge him as a thesis advisor.
^Almost all recollections of Gaetano Fichera concerning how this situation influenced his relationships with Mikhlin are presented in (Fichera 1994, pp. 56–61).
^See the comprehensive survey paper of Kozhevnikov (1999), describing the subject in his historical development including more recent development. The work of Mikhlin and his collaborators is summarized in the paper (Mikhlin 1973): for a detailed analytical treatment, see also appendix I, pp. 271—311 of the posthumous book (Mikhlin, Morozov & Paukshto 1995).
^Also the treatise (Mikhlin & Prössdorf 1986) contains a lot of information on this field, and an exposition of both the one-dimensional and the multidimensional theory.
Fichera, G.; Maz'ya, V. (1978), "In honor of professor Solomon G. Mikhlin on the occasion of his seventieth birthday", Applicable Analysis, 7 (3): 167–170, doi:10.1080/00036817808839188, Zbl0378.01018. A short survey of the work of Mikhlin by a friend and his pupil: not as complete as the commemorative paper (Fichera 1994), but very useful for the English speaking reader.
Mikhlin, Solomon G. (7 September 1968), ЛИЧНЫЙ ЛИСТОК ПО УЧЕТУ КАДРОВ [Formation record list] (in Russian), USSR, pp. 1–5. An official resume written by Mikhlin itself to be used by the public authority in the former Soviet Union: it contains very useful (if not unique) information about his early career and school formation.