Stanislav Alekseevich Molchanov

Stanislav Molchanov was born on 21 December 1940 in the village of Snetinovo in the Ivanovo Oblast. His mother, Nina Grigorievna Molchanova, was an elementary school teacher. His father, Alexei Pavlovich Molchanov, was an accountant at a collective farm. As a son of a priest who had been persecuted after the Russian revolution, Alexei Molchanov was able to enroll at University (the Pedagogical Institute in the city of Ivanovo) only at the end of the 1940s, due to his status as a wounded veteran of WWII. After he graduated from the university, Alexei Molchanov started teaching physics at School no. 54 in the settlement of Nerl’ in the Teikovo District of the Ivanovo Oblast. Nina Molchanova moved to work at the same school as a teacher of German. After spending five years at a local school in Snetinovo, Molchanov moved to Nerl’ with his parents, where he graduated from School no. 54 with a gold medal. While in high school, he studied on his own some parts of elementary mathematics and introductory calculus not included in the high school program, using brochures from the school mathematical library and a book by A. Ya. Khinchin. In 1958 Molchanov enrolled in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. He received straight A grades, and, starting from his third year, he was a recipient of the Lenin Scholarship. He participated actively in the seminars of Prof. E. B. Dynkin, his scientific advisor. As a participant of the seminar, he carried out his first research work. After graduating from the university, Molchanov stayed there as a graduate student from 1963 till 1966. He was a member of Dynkin’s school, which exemplified a high level of general mathematical education: not only probability theory and stochastic processes, but also partial differential equations, Riemannian geometry, Lie groups and algebras, and so on.