Andrey Kolmogorov

Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Андре́й Никола́евич Колмого́ров, 25 April 1903 – 20 October 1987) was a Soviet mathematician who contributed to the mathematics of probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory and computational complexity. Andrey Kolmogorov was born in Tambov, about 500 kilometers south-southeast of Moscow, in 1903. His unmarried mother, Maria Yakovlevna Kolmogorova, died giving birth to him. Andrey was raised by two of his aunts in Tunoshna (near Yaroslavl) at the estate of his grandfather, a well-to-do nobleman. Little is known about Andrey's father. He was supposedly named Nikolai Matveyevich Katayev and had been an agronomist. Katayev had been exiled from Saint Petersburg to the Yaroslavl province after his participation in the revolutionary movement against the tsars. He disappeared in 1919 and was presumed to have been killed in the Russian Civil War. Andrey Kolmogorov was educated in his aunt Vera's village school, and his earliest literary efforts and mathematical papers were printed in the school journal "The Swallow of Spring". Andrey (at the age of five) was the "editor" of the mathematical section of this journal. Kolmogorov's first mathematical discovery was published in this journal: at the age of five he noticed the regularity in the sum of the series of odd numbers: etc. In 1910, his aunt adopted him, and they moved to Moscow, where he graduated from high school in 1920. Later that same year, Kolmogorov began to study at Moscow State University and at the same time Mendeleev Moscow Institute of Chemistry and Technology. Kolmogorov writes about this time: "I arrived at Moscow University with a fair knowledge of mathematics. I knew in particular the beginning of set theory. I studied many questions in articles in the Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron, filling out for myself what was presented too concisely in these articles." Kolmogorov gained a reputation for his wide-ranging erudition.