Do not trust your memory - it is fading
to all my advisers, colleagues, co-authors, and friends
Leonid A. Notov
My school physics teacher in Moscow in 1974-1979 - my luck started in school,
Leonid Abramovich is one of the most wonderful teachers I ever met!
It is thanks to his ecouragement that I pursued my studies at the university.
Boris I. Zhilinskií
- Chemistry Department, Moscow State University, Moscow
- Université du Littoral - Côte d'Opale, Dunkerque, France (since 1993)
We met when I was a second year student at the Moscow State University.
I was in a group specialized in theory and
Boris was teaching our problem classes (seminars) in quantum mechanics.
He became my Master thesis (diploma)
adviser and my unofficial Ph.D. thesis adviser. We have worked together ever
since.
Boris introduced me to modern group-theoretical techniques, such as irreducible
tensor formalism, and their application in quantum systems with several coupled
degrees of freedom, in particular in fine rotation-vibration structure of
spherical top molecules, where these methods play a very important role. Later,
as he matured himself, he took me with him on the tour of applications of
modern topology and invarint theory in the qualitative analysis of classical
mechanical systems and their quantum analogues. From the very beginning Boris
directed me towards obtaining concrete results that are important theoretically
and are useful in the analysis and understanding real systems.
Nikolaí N. Nekhoroshev†
1946 - 2008
- Department of Mathematics, Moscow State University
- Université du Littoral - Côte d'Opale, Dunkerque, France (2001-2002)
I met Nikolaí in Dunkerque at the end of 2001 when he took a 6 month invited
professor position at our university. He moved to Boulogne-sur-Mer where we
spent the New Year's eve together and worked thereafter very intensely up until
May 2002.
Kolya worked only in Russian. Normally he was able to say several English
phrases without difficulty, but when he was thinking intensely, he could not
even pronounce foreign words and it was sometimes difficult to catch up to him.
This explains his colorful Russian definitions of new objects which were so
difficult to translate! Very sharp and attentive to details, and at the same
time, reaching far ahead and widely to other domains that he understood and
felt so profoundly, Kolya could iterate painstakingly over and over the same
paragraph, lemma, or definition. Sometimes, the result of the whole day spent
together amounted to a half-page, and sometimes it was - frustratingly -
rejected the next day.
It was difficult work, but we succeeded in solving our problem and suggesting
something truly new in our field. At the time, with other things piling up,
there was no pride or even full appreciation, but now I am looking back with
gratitude to the destiny that let me meet and closely work with a mathematician
of such level.
It took us several years to write up our proofs of fractional monodromy, and
when the work
was finally
over, we expected Nikolaí to come again in May 2008, and to move together
towards new studies. It seemed that we had many years of fruitful
collaboration ahead of us. His sudden severe illness one week before his
departure put a brutal end to these plans. His many new ideas that he was so
eager to discuss with us had never come to light. When I saw him to say
farewell in July 2008, he had already lost his sight and had difficulty
speaking...
I became involved in preserving the memory of Nikolaí. We tried what we could
in the obituary in 2008. In 2016, largely due to the efforts of Alekseí
Borisov, the editor of the journal
Regular and Chaotic Dynamics, Kolya's last
100-page long manuscript and a volume dedicated to him with several short
accompanying texts were published.
- Obituary.
Uspekhi Mat. Nauk
64/3(387), 174-178 (2009), in Russian
- N.N.Nekhoroshev, Monodromy of the fibre with oscillatory singular point of type 1:(-2).
- Rus. J. Nonlin. Dyn.
12(3), 413-541 (2016), in Russian
- Afterword to the paper by N.N.Nekhoroshev.
Rus. J. Nonlin. Dyn.
12(3) 543-555 (2016),
in Russian
- Foreword to the issue dedicated to
the 70-th birthday anniversary of Nikolaí Nekhoroshev.
Reg. Chao. Dyn.
6(21) (2016)
- D.A.Sadovskií,
Nekhoroshev's approach to Hamiltonian monodromy.
Reg. Chao. Dyn.
6(21) (2016)
My colleagues at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (HIA)
- National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- Gerhard Herzberg†, Nobel Price Laureate in Chemistry
- James W. K. G. Watson, later at SIMS, now retired
- John W. C. Johns, retired
- Izobel Dabrowski, retired
John Delos
- College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia
I joined the Atomic Physics group of John after doing a lot of molecular
spectroscopy, and I liked the change. John directed me towards learning modern
classical mechanics, especially normal forms, and related bifurcation theory.
Under his supervision I ventured into areas which were unknown both to him and
to me. We were through a lot of hard work, difficult writing and finding common
language, and had an eventual success. We had a lot of good time too.
Louis Michel†
1923 - 1999
- Ecole Polytechnique, Centre de Physique Théorique
- Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES), Bures-sur-Yvette (1962)
- Membre of the French Academy of Sciences (1979)
- Wigner Medal recipient (1984)
I have met Louis briefly when he came several times to work with Boris in
Dunkerque in 1995-98. These were his last years and yet he was full of energy,
active and sharp. They used to discuss long hours with Boris and I got involved
in practical realizations of some of their ideas on the geometric
classification of the perturbed Kepler systems.
Richard Cushman
- Department of Mathematics, University of Utrecht, Holland
In the last few years after our first meeting at a workshop in Warwick in 1997,
I have been constantly learning from Richard Cushman and am glad to be one of
his co-workers. What I appreciate the most in Richard's work is that he
presents and studies modern mathematics based on examples of concrete dynamical
systems which he considers in great detail. As such his approach is very
accessible to physicists and practitioners.
Colleagues of my generation
- Dmitrií N. Kozlov, General Physics Institute, Moscow
- Vladimir Krivtsun, Institute of Spectroscopy, Troitzk, Moscow region
- John Shaw, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg
- Charles Schwieters, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg
- Igor Kozin,
Université du Littoral, Dunkerque and
Warwick University, U.K.
- Marc Joyeux, Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble I)
- Vincent Boudon, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon
- Andrea Giacobbe, University of Utrecht
Students
- Christophe Van Hecke,
Université du Littoral, stage et thèse
- Lucien Grondin,
Université du Littoral, stage de maîtrise
- Guillaume Dohnt,
Université du Littoral, stage de maîtrise
- Konstantinos Efstathiou,
Université du Littoral,
MASIE Ph.D. fellow with us,
graduate in Physics from the University of Athens
- Daniele Fontanari,
Université du Littoral, Ph.D. student
supervised jointly with Francesco Fassò at the University of
Padova, later a post-doc with us