Tashmukhamed Sarymsakov

Tashmukhamed Alievich Sarymsakov was born on 4 September 1915 (22 August in the old style) in Shahrikhan, today a city in the Andijan region, into an Uzbek family. After finishing a Russian secondary school in Kokand in 1931 he went to Tashkent and enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty of the Central Asian State University (SAGU), where he became one of the first students of Vsevolod Romanovsky.

He graduated in 1936 and stayed on at the university as a postgraduate, assistant and then docent. In 1942 he defended a doctoral dissertation on homogeneous stochastic processes with a countable set of possible states, and received the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the rank of professor. When the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR was founded in 1943, he was among its first academicians.

Alongside research he carried a heavy load of administration. He was rector of SAGU from March 1943 to June 1944, vice-president of the Academy in 1943–1947 and its president in 1947–1952. He then returned to the rectorship (1952–1958), served as the Uzbek SSR’s minister of higher and secondary specialised education from 1959 to 1971, and from 1971 to 1983 was rector of Tashkent State University. A member of the Communist Party from 1944, he sat in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the third convocation (1950–1954).

His main fields were probability theory (above all Markov chains), functional analysis, topological semifields and operator algebras, and later quantum probability. In 1953 he proved ergodic theorems for non-homogeneous Markov chains. A Tashkent school of functional analysis grew around him; he wrote more than 170 scientific papers, including 8 monographs, and trained 10 doctors and 50 candidates of science. In 1948 he received a Stalin Prize of the third degree for methods of short- and long-range weather forecasting.

His honours include the title Honoured Worker of Science and Technology of the Uzbek SSR (1960), the Beruni State Prize of the Uzbek SSR (1967) and the title Hero of Socialist Labour, conferred by decree of 3 April 1990; he was also awarded the Order of Lenin four times.

Sarymsakov died in Tashkent on 18 December 1995 and was buried there. In 2002 he was posthumously awarded the Order «Buyuk xizmatlari uchun» (For Outstanding Merit).