Vladimir Maz'ya was born on 31 December 1937[2] in a Jewish family.[12] His father died in December 1941 at the World War IIfront,[2][12][13] and all four grandparents died during the siege of Leningrad.[2][12] His mother, a state accountant,[14] chose to not remarry and dedicated her life to him:[12] they lived on her meager salary in a 9 square meters room in a big communal apartment, shared with other four families.[12][15] As a secondary school student, he repeatedly won the city's mathematics and physics olympiads[16] and graduated with a gold medal.[17]
In 1955, at the age of 18, Maz'ya entered the Mathematics and Mechanics Department of Leningrad University.[18] Taking part to the traditional mathematical olympiad of the faculty, he solved the problems for both first year and second year students and, since he did not make this a secret, the other participants did not submit their solutions causing the invalidation of the contest by the jury which therefore did not award the prize.[13] However, he attracted the attention of Solomon Mikhlin who invited him at his home, thus starting their lifelong friendship:[13] and this friendship had a great influence on him, helping him develop his mathematical style more than anyone else. According to Gohberg (1999, p. 2),[19] in the years to come, "Maz'ya was never a formal student of Mikhlin, but Mikhlin was more than a teacher for him. Maz'ya had found the topics of his dissertations by himself, while Mikhlin taught him mathematical ethics and rules of writing, referring and reviewing".[20]
More details on the life of Vladimir Maz'ya, from his birth to the year 1968, can be found in his autobiography (Maz'ya 2014).
Maz'ya graduated from Leningrad University in 1960.[1][21] The same year he gave two talks at Smirnov's seminar:[22] their contents were published as a short report in the Proceedings of the USSR Academy of Sciences[23][24] and later evolved in his "kandidat nauk" thesis, "Classes of sets and embedding theorems for function spaces",[25] which was defended in 1962.[26] In 1965 he earned the Doktor nauk degree, again from Leningrad University, defending the dissertation "Dirichlet and Neumann problems in Domains with irregular boundaries", when he was only 27.[27] Neither the first nor his second thesis were written under the guidance of an advisor: Vladimir Maz'ya never had a formal scientific adviser, choosing the research problems he worked to by himself.[28]
In 1978 he married Tatyana Shaposhnikova, a former doctoral student of Solomon Mikhlin, and they have a son, Michael:[34] In 1990, they left the URSS for Sweden, where Prof. Maz'ya obtained the Swedish citizenship and started to work at Linköping University.[35]
Currently, he is honorary Senior Fellow of Liverpool University and Professor Emeritus at Linköping University: he is also member of the editorial board of several mathematical journals.[36]
Starting from 1993, several conferences have been held to honor him: the first one, held in that year at the University of Kyoto, was a conference on Sobolev spaces.[45] On the occasion of his 60th birthday in 1998, two international conferences were held in his honor: the one at the University of Rostock was on Sobolev spaces,[45][46] while the other, at the École Polytechnique in Paris,[45][47] was on the boundary element method. He was invited speaker at the International Mathematical Congress held in Beijing in 2002:[37] his talk is an exposition on his work on Wiener–type criteria for higher order elliptic equations. Other two conferences were held on the occasion of his 70th birthday: "Analysis, PDEs and Applications on the occasion of the 70th birthday of Vladimir Maz'ya" was held in Rome,[48] while the "Nordic – Russian Symposium in honour of Vladimir Maz'ya on the occasion of his 70th birthday" was held in Stockholm.[49] On the same occasion, also a volume of the Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics was dedicated to him.[50] On the occasion of his 80th birthday, a "Workshop on Sobolev Spaces and Partial Differential Equations" was held on 17–18 May 2018 was held at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei to honor him.[51] On the 26–31 May 2019, the international conference "Harmonic Analysis and PDE" was held in his honor at the Holon Institute of Technology.[52]
Work
Research activity
Because of Maz'ya's ability to give complete solutions to problems which are generally considered as unsolvable, Fichera once compared Maz'ya with Santa Rita, the 14th century Italian nun who is the Patron Saint of Impossible Causes.
Maz'ya authored/coauthored more than 500 publications, including 20 research monographs. Several survey articles describing his work can be found in the book (Rossmann, Takáč & Wildenhain 1999a), and also the paper by Dorina and Marius Mitrea (2008) describes extensively his research achievements, so these references are the main ones in this section: in particular, the classification of the research work of Vladimir Maz'ya is the one proposed by the authors of these two references. He is also the author of Seventy (Five) Thousand Unsolved Problems in Analysis and Partial Differential Equations which collects problems he considers to be important research directions in the field [53]
Theory of boundary value problems in nonsmooth domains
for the weak solutionu of equation 1, where K is a constant depending on n, s, rκ and other parameters but not depending on the moduli of continuity of the coefficients. The integrability exponents of the Lp norms in Estimate 2 are subject to the relations
1/s ≥ 1/r - 2/n for n/2 > r > 1,
s is an arbitrary positive number for r = n/2,
the first one of which answers positively to a conjecture proposed by Guido Stampacchia (1958, p. 237).[56]
Maz'ya, Vladimir G. (1961), Некторые оценки решений эллиптических уравнений второго порядка, Доклады Академии Наук СССР (in Russian), vol. 137, pp. 1057–1059, Zbl0115.08701, translated as Maz'ya, Vladimir G. (1961), "Some estimates for solutions of elliptic second-order equations", Soviet Mathematics - Doklady, vol. 2, pp. 413–415, Zbl0115.08701.
Gelman, I. W; Mazja, W. G. (1981), Abschätzungen für Differentialoperatoren im Halbraum [Estimates for differential operators in the half space], Mathematische Lehrbücher und Monogaphien, II. Albeitung: Mathematische Monographien (in German), vol. 54, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, p. 221, ISBN978-3-7643-1275-6, MR0644480, Zbl0499.47028. A definitive monograph, giving a detailed study of a priori estimates of constant coefficient matrix differential operators defined on ℝn×(0,+∞], with n ≥ 1: translated as Gelman, Igor W; Maz'ya, Vladimir G. (2019) [1981], Estimates for differential operators in half-space, EMS Tracts in Mathematics, vol. 31, translated by Apushkinskaya, Darya, Zurich: European Mathematical Society, pp. xvi+246, doi:10.4171/191, ISBN978-3-03719-191-0, MR3889979, S2CID127027104, Zbl1447.47007.
^ ab(Maz'ya 1960). See (Agranovich et al. 2008, p. 189), (Anolik et al. 2008, p. 287), (Eidus et al. 1997, p. 2) and (Mitrea & Mitrea 2008, p. viii): Agranovich et al. (2008, p. 189) refer that "In their reviews, the opponents and the external reviewer noted that the level of the work far exceeded the requirements of the Higher Certification Commission for Ph.D. theses, and his work was recognized as outstanding at the thesis defence in the Academic Council of Moscow State University".
^Precisely, he become "старший научный сотрудник", abbreviated as "ст. науч. сотр.", according to Fomin & Shilov (1970, p. 824), the only source giving a precise date for this career advancement.
^Sundelöf (2004, p. 33) precisely states:-"Celsiusmedaljen i guld, Societetens främsta utmärkelse, har tilldelats professor Vladimir Maz'ya, Linköping, för hans framstående forskning rörande partiella differentialkvationer och hydrodynamik". See also the brief announce (AMS 2005, p. 549).
Bonnet, Marc; Sändig, Anna-Margarete; Wendland, Wolfgang (1999), "Dedication", in Bonnet, M.; Sändig, A.-M.; Wendland, W. L. (eds.), Mathematical Aspects of Boundary Element Methods, dedicated to Vladimir Maz'ya on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Chapman & Hall / CRC Research Notes in Mathematics, vol. 414, Boca Raton/London: Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, pp. 3–6, ISBN978-1-58488-006-6, MR1726554, Zbl0924.00038. Proceedings of the minisymposium held at the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, 25–29 May 1998.
Fomin, S. V.; Shilov, G. E., eds. (1970), Математика в СССР 1958–1967 [Mathematics in the USSR 1958–1967] (in Russian), vol. Том второй: Биобиблиография выпуск второй М–Я, Москва: Издательство "Наука", p. 762, MR0250816, Zbl0199.28501. A two–volume continuation of the opus "Mathematics in the USSR during its first forty years 1917–1957", describing the developments of Soviet mathematics during the period 1958–1967. Precisely it is meant as a continuation of the second volume of that work and, as such, is titled "Biobibliography" (evidently an acronym of biography and bibliography). It includes new biographies (when possible, brief and complete) and bibliographies of works published by new Soviet mathematicians during that period, and updates on the work and biographies of scientist included in the former volume, alphabetically ordered with respect to author's surname.
Georgian National Academy of Sciences (30 October 2013), Membership diploma(PDF) (in Georgian and English). The membership diploma awarded to Vladimir Maz'ya on the occasion of his election as foreign member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences.
Khvoles, Aben Aleksandovich (1975), Сингулярные интегральные уравнения в пространствах Cω(M) [Singular integral equations on the space Cω(M)], Автореферат диссертации на соискание учёной кандидата физико-математических наук (in Russian), Тбилиси: Академяя Наук Грузинскои ССР–Razmadze Mathematical Institute. The summary of the kandidat nauk thesis of Aben Khvoles, one of the doctoral students of Vladimir Maz'ya.
Royal Society of Edinburgh (2008), RSE fellows(PDF), archived from the original(PDF) on 30 March 2016, retrieved 30 April 2012.
Sundelöf, Lars-Olof (2004), "Presentation av priser och belönigar år 2004", Årsbok 2004 (in Swedish), Uppsala: Kungl. Vetenskaps-Societeten i Uppsala, pp. 31–39, ISSN0348-7849. The "Presentation of prizes and awards" speech given by the Secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, written in the "yearbook 2004", on the occasion of the awarding of the Society prizes to prof. V. Maz'ya and to other 2004 winners.
Bonnet, M.; Sändig, A.–M.; Wendland, W. L., eds. (1999), Mathematical Aspects of Boundary Element Methods, dedicated to Vladimir Maz'ya on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Chapman & Hall/CRC Research Notes in Mathematics, vol. 414, Boca Raton/London: Chapman & Hall/CRC, p. 305, ISBN978-1-58488-006-6, MR1726554, Zbl0924.00038. Proceedings of the minisymposium held at the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, 25–29 May 1998.
Cialdea, Alberto; Lanzara, Flavia; Ricci, Paolo Emilio, eds. (2009), Analysis, partial differential equations and applications. The Vladimir Maz'ya anniversary volume. Selected lectures from the International Workshop held at Sapienza University, Rome, June 30–July 3, 2008, Operator Theory: Advances and Applications, vol. 193, Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, pp. ix–xvii, doi:10.1007/978-3-7643-9898-9, ISBN978-3-7643-9897-2, MR2760868, Zbl1173.35006.