Mikhail Livshitz

Mikhail Samuilovich Livsic (; 4 July 1917 – 30 March 2007) was a Ukrainian-born Israeli mathematician who specialized in functional analysis.

Biography Born in Pokotilova, Uman district on 4 July 1917, Livsic moved to Odessa with his family when he was four years old. His father was an associate professor of mathematics who frequented leading Soviet mathematicians in Odessa like Nikolai Chebotaryov, Veniamin Fedorovich Kagan, Mark Krein and Samuil O. Shatunovsky.

Originally, he worked on the moment problem, at that time the main research area of Krein, and with quasi-analytical functions. Soon after, he worked on the theory of operators, inspired by the work of Marshall Stone, John von Neumann, Abraham Plessner and Naum Ilyich Akhiezer .

Following the evacuation of the Odessa State University during the Second World War, Livsic received in 1942 in Maikop his Ph.D. on the application of Hermitian operators theory to the generalised moment problem under supervision of Mark Krein.

In 1945, Livsic passed his habilitation thesis on generalisations of von Neumann's extension theory that was evaluated by prominent mathematicians, namely Stefan Banach, Israel Gelfand, Mark Naimark and Plessner at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics.

Livsic could not return directly to the Odessa State University following the dismantling of Krein's school under the accusation of promoting too many Jewish mathematicians. Livsic himself was considered not being "suited for representing the Ukrainian culture". He worked on the physical interpretation of non-self adjoining operators and he developed a theory of open systems which are physical systems which interact with the environment. These research is compiled in two monographs. After moving to Tbilissi with his family, he started working on a generalisation of the Cayley-Hamilton theorem.

He moved to Israel in 1978 and settled in Beersheba. He became a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and started to work with Naftali Kravitsky on a theory of several commuting operators.