Robert A. Minlos
This issue of the Moscow Mathematical Journal is dedicated to Robert A. Minlos on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
Robert Minlos possesses all kind of features that are so characteristic of the Moscow mathematical school: broad education, which not only covers many diverse fields of mathematics, but reaches far outside it; wide scope of interests; care and love for his students and colleagues; indifference to his own career success; firm stand against the pressures and temptations of the Soviet regime.
All of his mathematical works reveals both his deep understanding of the beauty of physics and his background of a rigorous mathematician. His main tools are analysis and probability. There are several domains where his results are fundamental:
- generalized random processes on function spaces,
- functional integrals,
- representation theory of the Lorenz group,
- superconductivity.
His recent area of research is statistical physics, which is the part of modern mathematics created, in particular, by the activity of the world-renowned Moscow Statistical Physics seminar, run by Dobrushin, Malyshev, Minlos, and Sinai for nearly forty years. Among the topics Minlos developed are
- thermodynamic limit of entropy,
- limit Gibbs distributions,
- low temperature phase transitions,
- relation between statistical physics and quantum field theory,
- spectral properties of the Ising model,
- cluster operators,
- random walks in random environment,
- phase transition for quantum systems.
Minlos' monographs ``Representation of rotation groups and the Lorenz group'' (with I. M. Gelfand, Z. Ja. Shapiro), ``Gibbs random fields'' (with V. A. Malyshev), ``Linear operators in infinite-particle systems'' (with V. A. Malyshev), ``Introduction to mathematical statistical physics'' are of great help to several generations of mathematicians.
Robert Minlos is the head of the Dobrushin Math Lab of the Institute for Information Transmission Problems, professor of the Independent University of Moscow and of Moscow State University; he is on editorial boards of several international journals and on the board of the Moscow Mathematical Society. He travels a lot, so that many can experience the pleasure of his company as a generous mathematician and a kind human being, with love and deep knowledge of art, literature, and history.
For the younger generations he is an example of what is called ``Russian intellegencia''.
We wish Robert Minlos many years of creative activity.
Yu. Ilyashenko, V. Malyshev, S. Shlosman, Ya. Sinai, M. Tsfasman.
