Ivan Sokolnikoff

Ivan Stephan Sokolnikoff (1901, Chernigov Province, Russian Empire – 16 April 1976, Santa Monica) was a Russian-American applied mathematician, who specialized in elasticity theory and wrote several mathematical textbooks for engineers and physicists.

Biography Born to a wealthy family in Tsarist Russia, Ivan Sokolnikoff was educated by private tutors and at Anders Classical Gymnasium in Kiev. During the Russian Revolution, as a Tsarist naval officer, he was wounded in combat off the Kuril Islands. With the victory of the Reds, he became a refugee in China. There he worked for a subsidiary of an American electrical firm until 1922 when he became an American immigrant in Seattle. In 1922 he matriculated at the University of Idaho and graduated there with an electrical engineering degree in 1926. In 1930 he received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His doctoral dissertation On a Solution of Laplace's Equation with an Application to the Torsion Problem for a Polygon with Reentrant Angles was written under the supervision of Herman William March. In June 1931 Sokolnikoff married Elizabeth Thatcher Stafford. During the years from 1931 to 1941, they wrote 5 significant papers together, as well as the classic textbook Higher Mathematics for Physicists and Engineers. He joined the mathematics department of the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an instructor in 1927

During WW II Sokolnikoff lived in New York and Washington The Mathematical Theory of Elasticity , McGraw Hill, 1946, 2nd edition 1956 Tensor Analysis - theory and applications to geometry and mechanics of continua , Wiley 1951, 2nd edition 1964 with Raymond Redheffer: Mathematics of physics and modern engineering, McGraw Hill 1958, 2nd edition 1966