Sergei Ivanovich Adian

Academician Sergei Ivanovich Adian (1 January 1931 —5 May 2020), one of the most prominent Russian mathematicians, was born in the mountain village of Kushchi, in the Dashkasan district of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, which lies 40 kilometers away from the town of Ganja (which was soon renamed Kirovabad, but now is Ganja again). His father Ivan Arakelovich Adian was a carpenter, a son of a herdsman, and his mother Lusik was a daughter of Konstantin Truzyan, a peasant. Two years later Sergei Adian’s parents moved to Kirovabad. By the beginning of World War II they had four children. In 1941, during the first days of the war the father was conscripted and was soon killed when his unit was surrounded. Sergei, like his parents, did not speak Russian, but in 1938 they sent him to the Russian secondary school no. 11 in Kirovabad, where his mathematical abilities became obvious quite early. When he graduated, the public education department of Kirovabad applied to have him included in the Azerbaijan quota of graduates sent to study at Moscow State University. The application was declined (it was mainly ethnic Azerbaijanis that were accepted), and as a result he enrolled in