ABSTRACT
18 January 1981 marked the eightieth anniversary of the birth of Ivan Georgievich Petrowsky. Petrowsky holds a prominent place in the history of science and culture of our country, as a scientist, as a public figure, and as a person of exceptional intellectual and moral strength. For hyperbolic systems Petrowsky studied the Cauchy problem. In studying partial differential equations, Petrowsky was the first to make wide use of algebraic and topological methods. In 1933 Petrowsky published a paper on the topology of real algebraic curves which, in particular, contained an answer to a number of questions posed in Hilbert’s sixteenth problem. Petrowsky also published a number of papers on ordinary differential equations, the equations of mathematical physics, calculus of variations, and so on. In 1933 he became a Professor at the University of Moscow. A significant part of Petrowsky’s activity was connected with the USSR Academy of Sciences.
