Andrey Nikolayevich Tychonoff (Андрей Николаевич Тихонов: October 30, 1906–1993) was a Russian mathematician. Tychonoff originally published in German, whence the transliteration. The English style "Tikhonov" is also commonly seen.

Born near Smolensk, he studied at Moscow where he graduated in 1927. In 1933 he was appointed as a professor at Moscow University. He received numerous honors, like the Lenin Prize in 1966 and the membership in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Tychonoff worked in a number of different fields in mathematics. He made important contributions to topology, functional analysis, mathematical physics, and certain classes of ill-posed problems. Tikhonov regularization, one of the most widely used methods to solve inverse problems, is named in his honour. He is best known for his work on topology, including the metrization theorem he proved in 1926, and the Theorem of Tychonoff which states that every product of arbitrarily many compact topological spaces is again compact. In his honor, completely regular topological spaces are also named Tychonoff spaces.

Publications

• AN Tikhonov and VY Arsenin, Solutions of ill-posed problem, Winston, New York, 1977 ISBN 0470991240

See also

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Tikhonov.html