Nikolai Nazarov

Nikolai Nikolaevich Nazarov was born on 23 February 1908 in Ashgabat into a family of teachers: his father, Nikolai Stepanovich, taught physics and mathematics (later a docent at Central Asian State University) and his mother, Yekaterina Alekseyevna, taught language and literature. He was educated at home by his parents, and his gift for mathematics showed very early.

In 1919, aged eleven, Nazarov passed the secondary-school mathematics examinations before Professor V. I. Romanovsky. At the professor's request he was admitted to the mathematics department of the Turkestan People's University (later Central Asian State University), from which he graduated in 1924. His diploma work was on the approximate calculation of double integrals.

In 1926 Academician V. A. Steklov invited him to the Physico-Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad as a postgraduate trainee. In 1928 he finished his postgraduate studies and returned to Tashkent, where he was an assistant at Central Asian State University in 1929–1931, a docent from 1932 and, from 1935, professor in the chair of mathematical analysis.

His research began with orthogonal polynomials and then extended to differential, integral and integro-differential equations, interpolation and mechanics. In 1938 he received the degree of doctor of physical and mathematical sciences for the dissertation "Nonlinear integral equations of Hammerstein type", in which he developed a theory of singular solutions and branch points; such equations are now called Nekrasov–Hammerstein equations. The "Golomb–Nazarov method" and the "equation of Nazarov type" are also connected with his work.

From 1943 to 1947 he directed the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences. He also headed departments at other higher schools in Tashkent: the textile, aviation and transport engineering institutes. During the war he lectured on exterior ballistics at the university and advised military factories. In 1945 he was named Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1946 he received the Order of the Badge of Honour and the medal "For Labour Valour".

Nazarov was a serious sportsman: a gymnast who in 1933–1935 was among the three best gymnasts of the republic and was regarded as the champion of Uzbekistan on the horizontal bar. He loved mountain hiking. In 1946 he took part in a hydrometeorological expedition to the Fedchenko Glacier, and in 1947 in an expedition to the Eastern Pamirs.

In the Pamirs he fell ill with pneumonia and died on 18 July 1947 in Murghab. His body was flown to Tashkent and he was buried on 21 July at the Botkin Cemetery. He wrote 53 works, 35 of them published. In 1957 the journal Uspekhi Matematicheskikh Nauk printed an essay by his pupil M. I. Kuchmar marking the tenth anniversary of his death.