Aleksandr Korkin - Biography

Biography

Korkin was born in the village Zhidovinovo (Mezhdurechensky District, Vologda Oblast). He was the son of the state peasant Nikolay Ivanovich Korkin.

By his initiative in 1845 the young Aleksandr got the possibility to live and to be educated in Vologda in the house of the grammar school teacher Aleksandr Ivanovich Ivanitski. This was remarkable because at that time in Russia peasants lived in serfdom, Korkin's family was committed to voluntary work for the Russian state.

After two years Aleksandr could visit the second class of the Vologda grammar school (after his father paid a donation of 200 roubles to the school and of 5 silver roubles to the Vologda administration to free the son from serfdom).

In 1853 Korkin finished the grammar school with the gold medal, in 1854 he registered at the physico-mathematical faculty of St. Petersburg University, where at that time mathematics were lectured by Somov, Bunyakovski and Chebyshev. Korkin visited Chebyshev's lectures about analytic geometry, higher algebra and number theory.

In 1857 for the first time Korkin was paid attention to because of his contribution About Largest and Smallest Quantities, which was awarded the gold medal in the students' competition. His referee was Bunyakovski. Korkin there investigated several properties of local extrema of explicit or implicit differentiable functions of one or more variables, but he also discussed problems from variational calculus. Especially this subject impressed him.

Because of this outstanding work Korkin was freed from writing a candidate thesis. In 1858, after the final examinations and another freeing from serfdom he could start with his first pedagogical job at the first cadet school (till 1861).

In 1860 a positive report of Chebyshev caused the offer to Korkin for the appointment of a lecturer for pure mathematics, which he could start after finishing the master examinations. December 11, 1860 he defended his master thesis On the Determination of Arbitrary Functions Given by Integrals of Partial Differential Equations. Its supervisor was Chebyshev.

In 1861 Korkin's post was confirmed and he became scientific assistant (adjunkt). After the students' unrest in the early summer of 1861 the university was closed for the winter (officially even until August 1863) and the young scientists, including Korkin, were sent abroad "to prepare the appointment of a professor".

At first Korkin went to Paris. After a period of self-studies on elliptic functions he visited lectures of various mathematicians, among them were Liouville and Bertrand. Especially Betrand's lectures about partial differential equations were of special interest for Korkin.

After a brief return to Russia in May 1863 Korkin again left home for Berlin, where he heard Kummer's lectures on circular polynomials, Weierstraß lectures on elliptic functions and Kronecker's lectures about quadratic forms.

Korkin returned to Saint Petersburg in September 1864 and again took up his job as a lecturer.

At the end of 1867 he defended his doctoral thesis About Systems of Partial Differential Equations of First Order and Some Questions from Mechanics, the opponents again were Chebyshev and Somov.

In May 1868 Korkin became extraordinary professor at the chair of pure mathematics, 1873 he was promoted to ordinary professor, 1886 to deserved professor. At the Saint Petersburg university he lectured until his death in 1908. He alone lectured thirty years students of higher semesters about partial differential equations and variational calculus (from winter 1875/76 until 1908). So the whole first generation of the Saint Petersburg Mathematical School got to know these so important subjects of mathematical physics only from him.

Besides his professorship from 1864 till 1900 Korkin lectured about calculus at the naval college (as a successor of Bunyakovski). Among his students was the later academician Alexei Nikolayevich Krylov.