Andrey Muchnik

Muchnik was born on February 24, 1958 to Albert Abramovich Muchnik and Nadezhda Mitrofanovna Ermolaeva. His father, Albert Muchnik, solved Post's problem about the existence of a non-trivial enumerable degree of Turing reducibility. Both of his parents were mathematicians and students of P. S. Novikov.

He entered Moscow State University, where he began working as a mathematician at the seminar of Evgenii Landis and Yulij Ilyashenko for junior students of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Lomonosov Moscow State University. His first work on differential equations was done in the second year under the guidance of Yu. S. Ilyashenko.

Starting from the third year, he specialized in the definability theory at the Department of Mathematical Logic, where Alexei Semenov was his supervisor. His diploma (1981) was about the solution of the problem posed by Michael Rabin at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice to eliminate transfinite induction in the proof of Rabin's most important theorem on the solvability of the monadic theory of infinite tree. Later, An. A. Muchnik used his approach to prove[1] a generalization of Rabin's theorem announced by Shelah and Stupp. Using the original idea of Alfred Tarski, he introduced in the notion of self-definability to obtain a short and elegant proof of Cobham-Semenov theorem.

Later, he worked at the Institute of New Technologies and the Scientific Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences on the complex problem of "Cybernetics." Eventually, he was one of the actual leaders of the Kolmogorov seminar at Moscow State University.

Muchnik also contributed fundamental results in the field of algorithmic information theory (Kolmogorov complexity). Many results obtained by himself and in collaboration with colleagues were published after his death.[2]

Andrey was awarded the A.N. Kolmogorov Prize Laureate (together with Alexei Semenov, 2006) - for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics for the series of works «On the refinement of A.N. Kolmogorov, related to the theory of chance».[3]

• Muchnik, Andrei Albertovich on the official website of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• Persons: Muchnik Andrey Albertovich. mathnet.ru. Retrieved 2016-3-15.
• "С. И. Адян, А. Л. Семёнов, В. А. Успенский, «Андрей Альбертович Мучник (некролог)», УМН, 62:4(376) (2007), 140–144". mathnet.ru. Retrieved 2016-03-15.