Akiva Yaglom

Akiva Moiseevich Yaglom (; 6 March 1921 – 13 December 2007) was a Soviet and Russian physicist, mathematician, statistician, and meteorologist. He was known for his contributions to the statistical theory of turbulence and theory of random processes. Yaglom spent most of his career in Russia working in various institutions, including the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics.

From 1992 until his death, Yaglom worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a research fellow in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Education and career Akiva Yaglom was born on 6 March 1921 in Kharkiv, Ukraine to the family of an engineer. He had a twin brother Isaak. The family moved to Moscow when the Yaglom brothers were five years old. During their school years they were keen on mathematics. In 1938 they shared the first prize at the Moscow mathematical competition for schoolchildren.

After he received his Ph.D., Yaglom was offered a job at the Lebedev Physical Institute by the future Nobel laureates Igor Tamm and Vitaly Ginzburg, but he declined the offer because he knew that the job would have required him to deal with applied problems related to the development of nuclear weapons. He joined in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences and worked at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Turbulence and worked there for more than 45 years. In 1955, he defended his second doctoral thesis "The Theory of Correlation between Continuous Processes and Fields with Applications to the Problems of Statistical Exploration of Time Series and to Turbulence Theory". He received the American Physical Society's Otto Laporte Award in 1988 for his "fundamental contribution to the statistical theory of turbulence and the study of its underlying mathematical structure."

Yaglom received the European Geosciences Union's 2008 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal, posthumously, for his "eminent and pioneering contributions to the development of statistical theories of turbulence, atmospheric dynamics and diffusion, including spectral techniques, stochastic and cascade models."

Books authored Yaglom authored six books and about 120 research papers. Most of his materials have been published in English and many other languages. A. M. Yaglom and I. M. Yaglom, Challenging Mathematical Problems With Elementary Solutions, Volume 1, Dover Publications, 1987. A. M. Yaglom and I. M. Yaglom, Challenging Mathematical Problems With Elementary Solutions, Volume 2, Dover Publications, 1987. A. S. Monin and A. M. Yaglom, Statistical Fluid Mechanics: Mechanics of Turbulence, Dover Publications, 2007.