Life and work of Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov (Q945986)

This paper is dedicated to Lyapunov's 150th birthday. He was born on May 25, 1857 in Yaroslavl, studied 1876--1880 at St. Petersburg University by P. L. Chebyshev and his successors A. N. Korkin and E. I. Zolotarev, received a gold medal for works written under the supervision of D. K. Bobylev, and stayed at the chair of mechanics. In 1995 he defended his Master's dissertation which immediately brought him fame in Europe. In 1895 he was invited to head the chair of mechanics in Kharkov University, where he elaborated a radically new powerful method of characteristic functions, which allowed him to prove the famous central limit theorem in the theory of probability. His famous book on stability in 1892 made him famous all over the world. In 1901 Lyapunov was elected Member of the Academy of Sciences at the chair of applied mathematics, and one year later, in 1902 he moved to St. Petersburg. Here he turned to the problem of the shapes of equilibrium for a turbulent fluid. In 1917 he moved to Odessa, where he died on November 3, 1918. In the second part of the paper it is briefly given an idea of the first method in Lyapunov's theory of stability and the influence that it exerted on further development of mathematics, trying to follow his original text as close as possible. The first method is considered far ahead of that time. It was not earlier than 40 years later that, owing to the exceptional talent of 0. Perron, mathematicians began understanding problems of absolute stability and related notions and methods. In the beginning of the 1970, with the hyperbolic chaos, the Lyapunov's first method comes to the fore (Perron's methods are here completely insufficient).