Alexei Bronislavovich Sossinsky

Alexei Bronislavovich Sossinsky, member of the editorial board of MMJ, one of the pillars of the Independent University of Moscow, turned seventy on October 7, 2007.

One of the main features of his life is—as he puts it himself in the title of his memoirs about the Golden Age of Russian mathematics—``In the other direction.'' The motion ``in the other direction'' was begun by his father, Vladimir–Bronislav–Semikhat, a hero of the Civil War in Russia, on the side of the White Army. Vladimir moved to France where he organized, 20 years later, a resistance to the Nazi regime on the island of Oléron and was awarded the highest French military order of ``Cross with Swords.''

As well as his father, by all his life, Alexei was and is ``chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.''

Alexei Sossinsky was a schoolboy in France and a college student in the US, always remaining Russian. He returned back to his motherland at the age of nineteen. He did this in a time when numerous Russian people dreamed of moving to the West and almost nobody wanted to move in other direction.

Alexei graduated from NYU (New York University) with a diploma ``cum laudes'' handed to him by Lipman Bers. In Moscow State University he entered the seminar of Professor Lyudmila V. Keldysh, one of the most faithful students of Lusin and one of the most honest and independent mathematicians in her generation. It is a great benefit of the academic system all over the world that a student can choose an adviser in his own image and the Moscow State University of the fifties gave a great choice for that.

In the seminar of L. V. Keldysh, Sossinsky studied continuous embeddings of manifolds into Euclidean spaces. Later on he found a fundamental result in the theory of multidimensional knots. Namely, he proved that in the semi-group of these knots there is no inverse element, and any knot can be decomposed in the sum of simple irreducible ones.

His high abilities and excellent taste in English and French happened to be in high demand in Russia. As he put it once himself ``Being too bad in foreign languages, I speak but the three mother tongues.'' In these three he is really perfect. His book ``How to write a mathematical paper in English'' provides an invaluable help to those who use ``the most vastly spread language in the world: broken English.'' This is a work on the boundary of mathematical linguistics, logic, mathematics, and fine arts.

From the very beginning of his life in Russia, Sossinsky became an illustrious teacher. He taught at the Kolmogorov high school from its very foundation and attracted its best students to serious mathematics.

In 1974 his teaching at the Moscow State was interrupted by the regime. Moving ``in the other direction'' once again, Alexei wrote a letter in support of Solzhenitsyn at the moment he was exiled from the Soviet Union. He became one of the editors of the journal ``Quant'' organized by Kolmogorov and Kikoin for high school children interested in physics and mathematics. His independent position in the editorial board, as well as the situation in Soviet Union, may be illustrated by the opinion of the local human resources chief: ``A re-emigrant is worse than a Jew.''

From the very creation of the Independent University of Moscow, Sossinsky was one of the most active faculty members. He taught brilliant courses in geometry and topology, both in the general program of the IUM and in the Math-in-Moscow program. The open, friendly and democratic atmosphere of the Independent university, to large extent, is due to him. It is more than natural that he was chosen to become the first director of the Russian-French Laboratory, now named after Poncelet, and it is not accidental that he is awarded a high French order of ``Chevalier des Palmes académiques.''

Alexei Bronislavovich is active and full of energy. We cordially wish him many happy returns of the day!

A. Chernavski, Yu. Ilyashenko, S. Lando,
S. Matveev, M. Tsfasman, V. Vassiliev