Naum Ilyitch Feldman

Abstract

This volume gathers papers dedicated to the memory of Professor Naum Ilyitch Feldman (1918–1994). For many years he worked at Moscow Lomonosov State University, in the Department of Number Theory. I remember him as one of my favorite teachers at the University.

Naum Ilyitch Feldman was born in a Jewish family on November 26, 1918, in the city of Melitopol in the south of Russia. Those were difficult times for Russia. Toward the end of World War I a revolution befell the Russian Empire, followed by a civil war.

After graduating from secondary school in 1936, N. I. Feldman studied at Saint Petersburg University (called at that time Leningrad University) under the supervision of Professor Rodion Osievich Kuzmin.

From 1941 till the end of the World War II he served in the Soviet Army as an artillery officer. After the war he entered a PhD program at Moscow University. His scientific adviser was Alexandr Osipovich Gelfond. In 1949 he published his first papers, devoted to approximations to logarithms of algebraic numbers and got a doctoral degree. From 1961 till his death on April 20, 1994, he worked at Moscow Lomonosov State University. I remember him as an excellent lecturer, a widely educated mathematician and an extremely friendly person.

His research was mostly devoted to transcendence theory and its applications. I can say that he was a great admirer of numbers. He truly loved them. This brief note mentions three of his best known results.