Isaak Yaglom

Isaak Moiseevich Yaglom (; 6 March 1921 – 17 April 1988) was a Soviet mathematician and author of popular mathematics books, some with his twin Akiva Yaglom.

Yaglom received a Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1945 as student of Veniamin Kagan. As the author of several books, translated into English, that have become academic standards of reference, he has an international stature. His attention to the necessities of learning (pedagogy) make his books pleasing experiences for students. The seven authors of his Russian obituary recount "…the breadth of his interests was truly extraordinary: he was seriously interested in history and philosophy, passionately loved and had a good knowledge of literature and art, often came forward with reports and lectures on the most diverse topics (for example, on Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and the Dutch painter M. C. Escher), actively took part in the work of the cinema club in Yaroslavl and the music club at the House of Composers in Moscow, and was a continual participant of conferences on mathematical linguistics and on semiotics."

University life Yaglom started his higher education at Moscow State University in 1938. During World War II he volunteered, but due to myopia he was deferred from military service. In the evacuation of Moscow he went with his family to Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains. He studied at Sverdlovsk State University, graduated in 1942, and when the usual Moscow faculty assembled in Sverdlovsk during the war, he took up graduate study. Under the geometer Veniamin Kagan he developed his Ph.D. thesis which he defended in Moscow in 1945. It is reported that this thesis "was devoted to projective metrics on a plane and their connections with different types of complex numbers (where , or , or else )." A great number of mathematicians are credited in this account of the modern tools and methods of symmetry.

In 2009 the book was republished by Ishi Press as Geometries, Groups and Algebras in the Nineteenth Century.