Aleksandr Lavrik

Aleksandr Fyodorovich Lavrik was born on 5 November 1927 in the village of Georgievka in Siberia (now in Kemerovo Oblast). He took part in the Second World War. In 1952 he completed Fergana State Pedagogical Institute as an external student, qualifying as a mathematics teacher, and taught at a school in Tashkent.

From 1957 to 1967 he worked at the Tashkent Higher Combined Arms Command School. In 1958 he defended a candidate’s dissertation, “Some additive problems of number theory”, and in 1967 a doctoral dissertation on functional and approximate functional equations of Dirichlet functions.

From August 1967 he headed the department of higher mathematics at the Tashkent Institute of Railway Engineers. In 1989 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, and in 2000 a full member.

Lavrik’s main work belongs to number theory, function theory and mathematical analysis. He developed a method for studying approximate functional equations of Dirichlet functions, obtained an estimate of the remainder term in an elementary proof of the asymptotic law of the distribution of primes, and worked on the Riemann hypothesis. He wrote more than a hundred scientific papers, and six doctoral and ten candidate dissertations were defended under his supervision.

For a series of works on approximate functional equations for zeta functions he received the A. A. Markov Prize in 1974; in 1977 he was named Honoured Scientist of the Uzbek SSR, in 1987 he received the “Honorary Railwayman” badge, and he held ten Soviet and Uzbek medals. He sat on a problem council of the Academy of Sciences and on the editorial board of the “Uzbek Mathematical Journal”, and was a permanent member of the programme committee of the regular Russian conference “Modern Problems of Number Theory”.

Aleksandr Lavrik died in Tashkent on 28 May 2010 and was buried at the Botkin Cemetery.