Mikhailo Vasylovych Novitskii

(1950-2001)

Mikhailo Vasylovych Novitskii was born on April 15, 1950 in the village of Solovitino, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in the family of a teacher of Maths. In 1952, the family moved to Kremenchug, where in 1967 Misha Novitskii graduated from high school with a silver medal. In 1967, he entered the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Kharkiv University (V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University now). Scientific activity of M.V. Novitskii began at the last grades of Mekhmat under the guidance of B.Ya. Levin. Being just a 4^th-year student, he published a paper devoted to completely convex functions. After graduation from university in 1972, M.V. Novitskii was accepted into graduate school at the Department of Function Theory of B. Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, where he worked until the last days of his life. Doing a research at graduate school, M.V. Novitskii obtained a number of interesting results on integral representations of completely convex and completely Z-superharmonic functions. These results formed the basis of his Ph.D. thesis, which he defended in 1976. After defending his Ph.D. thesis, M.V. Novitsky showed interest in inverse problems of spectral analysis of the Schrödinger operator and nonlinear completely integrable equations. In this direction, he received remarkable results, basing on which he defended his doctoral dissertation “Spectral Invariants of the Set of Schrödinger Operators, Inverse Problems and Related Functionals" in 1998 The works of M.V. Novitskii were highly appreciated by specialists all over the world. As a visiting professor, he worked at various universities in the USA, Great Britain and France, participated in many international conferences. M.V. Novitskii combined his scientific work with teaching general and special courses and supervising theses at the Department of Mathematical Analysis of Kharkiv University.

People that knew M.V. Novitskii were under the spell of his personality. Smooth in communication, affable and cheerful, full of energy and initiative, he was always the soul of society.

Mikhailo Vasylovych tragically died in a car accident in the United States on September 21, 2001.