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Vladimir A. Rokhlin
was born
in Baku (Azerbaijan) on August 23, 1919.
In 1935 he entered the Moscow State
University. His teachers were A.I.Plesner, L.S.Pontriagin,
P.S.Alexandrov, A.N.Kolmogorov, I.M.Gel'fand.
Rokhlin was a volunteer in the beginning of the war in 1941.
He was a war prisoner in a German concentration camp and after the war he
spent two years in a Soviet filtration camp.
During 1947 - 1949
he made fundamental contributions to measure theory and ergodic theory.
He returned to these subjects after 1958 and made important works in
the theory of entropy. In the 50s he obtained his famous results
in topology (homotopy groups of spheres, cobordisms of low dimensional
manifolds, signature of 4-manifolds, characteristic classes).
For the last 25 years of his life Rokhlin was a professor of the Leningrad
State University,
where he created well-known
mathematical schools. In this period his main interest was in
characteristic classes, low dimensional topology and real algebraic
geometry.
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