Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin
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Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin, Russian: Владимир Абрамович Рохлин (August 231919 - December 31984) was one of the leading mathematicians of the USSR, working in the fields of topology, geometry and ergodic theory. He was born to a Jewish family in Baku. He entered Moscow State University in 1935. His advisors were A.N. Kolmogorov and L.S. Pontriagin.
He volunteered for the army in 1941, leading to years as a prisoner of a German war camp, and then two years in a Soviet camp after the end of the war. He then returned to mathematics. His result of 1952 on the signature of 4-manifolds received a great deal of attention, and was generalised by Hirzebruch. He worked also in the theory of characteristic classes, homotopy theory and cobordism theory.
From 1959 he was at Leningrad State University, where he was a very influential teacher. He contributed also to real algebraic geometry.