[Turkmath:5932] Oleksandr (Alexander) Sharkovsky - November 21, 2022

[Mehmet Ünal]

[cid:ii_lci2why20]



Dear Dr. Unal

On Monday, November 21, 2022, 10:40 am, Oleksandr (Alexander) Sharkovsky was an icon in the areas of difference equations and discrete dynamical systems. Professor Sharkovsky passed away at the age of 86.

Professor Sharkovsky was born on December 6, 1936 in Kyiv, Ukraine. He received his Ph.D. in 1961 from the Institute of Mathematics at the Ukrainian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1978, Sharkovsky was elected as a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 2006 he was elected as an Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

As Head of the Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Sharkovsky led a team which was awarded the 2010 State Prize of Ukraine in Science and Technology: For a series of scientific papers "Theory of Dynamical Systems: Methods and Applications".

Professor Sharkovsky contributed tremendously to the education of many students.  He supervised 17 doctoral students, many of them then became leading mathematicians on their own.

One of the landmark papers of Professor Sharkovsky is his 1964 paper titled “ Coexistence of cycles of a continuous map of the line into itself “.  Roughly speaking this theorem states that when a continuous function has a cycle of a given period, it has cycles of other periods specified through their appearance in a certain ordering of the positive integers, i.e., the Sharkovsky’s ordering.  This result became known as Sharkovsky’s Theorem. Almost all books on difference equations or discrete dynamical systems include Sharkovsky’s Theorem.  There is no doubt that this theorem led to the establishment of many new areas of dynamical systems, including but not limited to, combinatorial dynamics, and chaos theory.

Professor Sharkovsky was a devout member of our society, and delivered many plenary talks at the international conference of difference equations (ICDEA); the annual conferences of ISDE. And in 2011, he was awarded the first Aulbach Prize, a life-time achievement award at the annual meeting of ISDE at Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada.

Attached, please find a more detailed biography of Professor Sharkovsky, published by his institution.

The death of Professor Sharkovsky is a great loss to all of us and to the mathematical community at large. Our condolences to his family, friends and associates.


Saber Elaydi

Saber Elaydi
President, ISDE








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