Vladimir Igorevich Arnold (1937–2010)

V I Arnold (referred to as Vladimir Igorevich or VI in Russian) was born into a strongly academic family, and recalls being given problems to solve at home, and later in school, from the age of five, and delighting in solving them. He entered the undergraduate class at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow State University in 1954, and records that it may have been possible, in spite of his Jewish mother, only because Stalin had died in 1953. His mentor, Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (hence AN), was a towering figure, and the other professors in the department such as Petrovsky and Pontryagin were of a comparable calibre. The combination of mathematics and mechanics in the title of the department would be considered unusual in most countries today but was quite natural given the way the Russian school developed