achievable efficiency in energy capture. He investigated general problems of geometrical interpretation of thermodynamics and general properties of non-classical entropies. In the mathematical theory of natural selection, Gorban developed a theory of a special class of dynamical systems with inheritance. He discovered and explained theoretically the universal phenomenon of system adaptation under stress conditions, leading to simultaneous increase of correlations and variance in the multidimensional space of system parameters. The Anna Karenina principle developed by Gorban is now applied as a method of diagnostics and prognosis for economics and human physiology. Gorban developed highly efficient parallel methods for artificial neural networks (ANN) learning, based on systematic use of duality of their functioning, and developed methods of knowledge extraction from data based on sparse ANNs. He proved the theorem of universal approximation properties of ANN. All these approaches have found numerous applications in existing expert systems. Together with I. Tyukin, he developed a series of methods and algorithms for fast, non-iterative and non-destructive corrections of errors in legacy Artificial intelligence systems. These methods are based on the concentration of measure phenomena, ideas of statistical mechanics and original stochastic separation theorems. In applied statistics, Gorban developed methods for constructing principal manifolds (Elastic maps method) and their generalizations (principal graphs, principal trees), based on the mechanical analogy with elastic membrane. The method has found numerous applications for visualization and analysis of economical, sociological and biological data. In collaboration with E.M. Mirkes and other authors, used machine learning methods for connecting individual psychological characteristics and predisposition to consuming certain types of drugs. In bioinformatics Gorban was one of the first to apply the method of frequency dictionaries and Principle of maximum entropy for analysis of nucleotide and amino acid sequences. He investigated the general properties of compact genomes and proved the existence of a 7-cluster structure in the genome sequence, which was applied for solving the de novo gene identification problem. Bibliography Selected books: Selected articles: Notes External links Alexander N. Gorban's homepage Correlation adaptometry Thermodynamics in chemical reaction networks Methods of non-linear principal manifolds The mathematical theory of natural selection 1952 births Living people People from Omsk Russian physicists Russian mathematicians Russian dissidents Academics of the University of Leicester Novosibirsk State University alumni Transport engineers