100 лет со дня рождения

N.N. Vorontsov
. Alexey Andreevich 
Lyapunov. Essays on His Life and Work. His Personality and Circle. 
(Moscow: Novyi Khronograph, 2011. 239 pp.)”. The biography was 
written by Nikolay Nikolayevich Vorontsov back in 1977, and was edited 
and prepared for publication by Elena Alexeyevna Lyapunova. 
To commemorate the 100
th
anniversary of A.A. Lyapunov’s birth, 
we present this new book to your attention. 
The book consists of seven parts. Part One contains a detailed bio-
graphical description of A.A. Lyapunov’s life and work. Part Two in-
cludes Lyapunov’s writings about his teachers, pupils and colleagues. 
These essays fully demonstrate his ability to provide clear and logical 
explications of complex issues in various areas of science, thus making 
them accessible to the reader. Some of these papers were previously 
published in various scientific sources and can currently be considered 

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13
Editors’ foreword
bibliographic rarities. Others were recently discovered in archives and 
are published for the first time. This section includes Lyapunov’s essays 
about the mathematicians N.N. Luzin, P.S. Novikov and L.V. Keldysh, 
the physicist P.P. Lazarev, the geophysicist G.A. Gamburtsev, the biolo-
gist I.I. Schmalhausen and others. Part Three includes a collection of 
several theoretical and methodological papers by A.A. Lyapunov. As is 
well known, Lyapunov was a brilliant and original educator. Among 
other issues, he was particularly concerned with the methodology of 
education and the reform of curricula. Part Four contains papers by 
the mathematicians A.N. Lyapunov and S.S. Kutateladze who comment 
on A.A. Lyapunov’s series of works on fully additive vector functions 
and the Lyapunov Convexity Theorem. These works have found broad 
application in mathematical statistics and mathematical economics. 
In Part Five, B.A. Trakhtenbrot describes his memories of Lyapunov’s 
work in the area of set theory during his stay in Novosibirsk as well as 
a remarkable episode concerning his relationship with his last pupil in 
that field, V.I. Amstislavsky. The book makes special emphasis on me-
moirs, which comprise Part Six. We received such memoirs from nu-
merous contributors who had worked with Lyapunov or had an occasion 
to meet him. The section includes almost 30 such essays. Among the 
authors are people of all ages including childhood friends of Lyapu-
nov, well-known members of the Academy of Sciences, and students of 
the Artillery Academy and other educational institutions. The section 
even includes memoirs of the former world chess champion Mikhail 
Botvinnik. 
Every memoir mentions the indelible impression that this wise, 
honorable and selfless person made on people. The high spiritual and 
moral standards of Alexey Andreevich Lyapunov provide full grounds for 
describing him as an “
devotee
” – the word rarely used nowadays but re-
cently redefined by Vladimir Andreyevich Uspensky as follows: “
A devotee 
is a person who engages in his work selflessly, without thinking of his per-
sonal profit and having subjugated his ambitions and actions to a great 
cause
”. 
The Attachments to this book (Part Seven) include certain archival 
documents relating to A.A. Lyapunov’s life history, several versions of 
his autobiography written over the years, a list of more than 100 papers 
delivered and discussed at the cybernetics seminars that Lyapunov con-
ducted at Moscow State University during 1956–1964, documents relat-
ing to the founding of Lyapunov scholarship at NSU, the full bibliogra-
phy of his scientific and publicistic works and a bibliography of 
publications about him.

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14
Editors’ foreword
The book ends on a major chord as it describes that in 2009, a street 
in Akademgorodok where the Physics and Math High School, Lyapu-
nov’s favorite creation, is located was renamed 
Lyapunov Street
in his 
honor. This act of commemoration was worthy of the prominent scien-
tist, educator and person that was Alexey Andreevich Lyapunov.
N.A. Lyapunova, A.M. Fedotov, Ya.I. Fet

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