Matthew Hayes

mhayes@ithacajournal.com | @IJmhayes

Eugene Dynkin died Nov. 14 at Cayuga Medical Center.

Dynkin was the rare mathematician who made contributions in two different fields of math.

Ithaca College’s Rachel Gould earned the Volunteer of the Year award from IES Abroad.

Renowned mathematician Eugene Dynkin who made contributions to two areas of mathematics, died Nov. 14 at Cayuga Medical Center. The professor emeritus at Cornell University was 90-years old.

As a mathematician Dynkin made fundamental advances in algebra while also being a leading light of probability theory. Laurent Saloff-Coste, professor and chair of mathematics at Cornell, called Dynkin “a superb lecturer who dazzled generations of students.”

Dynkin worked at Cornell for more than 30 years before retiring in 2010.

Born in Leningrad in 1924, his family suffered under the Stalinist regime, first through exile to Kazakhstan and the disappearance of his father.

“Every step in my professional career was difficult because the fate of my father, in combination with my Jewish origin, made me permanently undesirable for the party authorities at the university,” he once said.

As a young mathematician at Moscow State University he formed important tools for studying elementary particle physics through his study of Lie algebras, according to Cornell.

He emigrated to the United States in 1976 and joined the Cornell faculty in 1977. He was said to have enjoyed the friendliness of colleagues, the scenery surrounding Ithaca and his work with graduate students.

Much of career was devoted to probability theory, including Markov processes which describe a series of random events in which the future depends only on the present and not on previous events, according to Cornell.

He earned a lifetime achievement award from the American Mathematical Society in 1993, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He is survived by his wife, Irene; a daughter, Olga Barel; three grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Volunteer award

The director of the Ithaca College study abroad program recently received recognition for her volunteerism and work strengthening the study abroad field.

Rachel Gould was awarded the Volunteer of the Year award the nonprofit organization IES Abroad. The award cited Gould for extraordinary volunteer efforts and leadership, according to Ithaca College.

Along with her position as directory of the study abroad program, Gould also teaches Italian in the department of modern languages and literature.