Кирилл Андреевич Родосский (некролог)

Professor Kirill Andreevich Rodosskii, doctor of the physical and mathematical sciences, passed away in his 92nd year of life on 30 August 2004, after a long and severe illness. He was born on 25 February 1913 in St. Petersburg. Upon finishing secondary school in 1930 he started working at the October Chemical Industrial Complex in Leningrad. After the assassination of S. M. Kirov in December 1934, the political trials and repression began. In March 1935 the Rodosskii family was accused of anti-Soviet agitation and exiled for five years to Saratov. In those hard times Rodosskii, while working as an accountant, did not forget his passion for chess: he became the champion of Saratov Province. Furthermore, he continued his independent study of mathematics, which had attracted him since childhood. His uncommon diligence, resolve, and natural gifts helped him in 1936 to be admitted immediately to the second year of study in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Saratov State University. On graduating in 1940 he worked as an assistant in the Department of Mathematical Analysis. But after the creation in the same year of the Department of Algebra and Number Theory headed by the well-known scholar Professor Nikolai Grigor’evich Chudakov, who had been his first teacher, Rodosskii transferred to that department. In 1942 he was conscripted into the army, but soon was demobilized because of a serious illness and sent to work as a secondary-school teacher in the village of Strigai in Saratov Province. Then from May of 1944 he performed non-combatant service in one of the Building and Erection Directorates in Saratov, where he worked as a tutor of young workers who had gone through industrial training. After demobilization in 1945 Rodosskii again began working in his profession: first in the Saratov Economics Institute, then as a researcher in one of the scientific research institutes, and from 1949 once more in the Department of Algebra and Number Theory of Saratov State University. In 1947 he defended his Ph.D. dissertation “Distribution of the prime numbers in short arithmetic progressions”. And in 1954 he defended his D.Sc. dissertation “On zeros of L-functions and prime numbers” in the Steklov Mathematical Institute