Alexander Gorban

Alexander Nikolaevich Gorban (; 19 April 1952 – 21 September 2025) was a scientist of Russian origin, working in the United Kingdom. He was a professor at the University of Leicester, and director of its Mathematical Modeling Centre. Gorban contributed to many areas of fundamental and applied science, including statistical physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, machine learning and mathematical biology.

Gorban was the author of about 20 books and 300 scientific publications. He founded several scientific schools in the areas of physical and chemical kinetics, dynamical systems theory and artificial neural networks, and is ranked as one of the 1000 most cited researchers of Russian origin. In 2020, Gorban presented a keynote talk at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence.

He supervised six habilitations and more than 30 PhD theses.

Background Gorban was born in Omsk on 19 April 1952. His father Nikolai Vasilievich Gorban was a historian and writer exiled to Siberia, and his mother was a literature teacher in Omsk Pedagogical Institute. From 1965 to 1966, he studied at the Specialized Educational Scientific Center on Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology of Novosibirsk State University (SESC NSU). In 1967, at the age of 15, he entered Novosibirsk State University but was excluded from it in autumn 1969 because of his participation in January 1968 in political student movements against the convictions of Soviet writers Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov.

After studying for a year in a vocational technical school and following an individual extramural program at Omsk Pedagogical Institute, he obtained a master's degree with a thesis entitled Sets of removable singularities in Banach spaces and continuous maps under the supervision of Russian mathematician Vladimir B. Melamed.

From 1973 to 1976, he worked in the Omsk Institute Of Transport Engineers and published his first scientific works, but then moved to Krasnoyarsk where he was permanently employed at the Institute of Computational Modeling. In 1980, Gorban obtained his Candidate of Sciences diploma, corresponding to PhD in the Russian scientific degree hierarchy. His thesis title was Slow relaxations and bifurcations of omega-limit sets of dynamical systems (translated later into English He was a stepbrother of Svetlana Kirdina.

Research activity Gorban's scientific contributions have been made in theoretical physics, mechanics, functional analysis, theory of natural selection, theory of adaptation, artificial neural networks, physical kinetics, bioinformatics. A top level view of scientific activity and the future of applied mathematics have been given in his book "Demon of Darwin: idea of optimality and natural selection",

In functional analysis, Gorban investigated the properties of analytical Fredholm subsets in Banach spaces, formulated the relevant principle of maximum modulus and proved an analogue of the Remmert-Stein theorem.

In mathematical chemistry, Gorban investigated the thermodynamical properties of chemical systems based on the analysis of Lyapunov's function trees in the polytope of conservation laws.

Selected articles: