Vladimir Igorevich Arnold (alternative spelling Arnol'd, , 12 June 1937 – 3 June 2010) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. While he is best known for the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem regarding the stability of integrable systems, he made revolutionary and deep contributions in several areas including geometrical theory of dynamical systems theory, algebra, catastrophe theory, topology, algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry, symplectic topology, differential equations, classical mechanics, differential geometric approach to hydrodynamics, geometric analysis and singularity theory, including posing the ADE classification problem, since his first main result—the solution of Hilbert's thirteenth problem in 1957 at the age of 19. He co-founded two new branches of mathematics—KAM theory, and topological Galois theory (this, with his student Askold Khovanskii). He is widely regarded as one of greatest mathematicians of all time. Arnold was also known as a popularizer of mathematics. Through his lectures, seminars, and as the author of several textbooks (such as the famous Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics) and popular mathematics books, he influenced many mathematicians and physicists. Many of his books were translated into English. His views on education were particularly opposed to those of Bourbaki. Biography Vladimir Igorevich Arnold was born on 12 June 1937 in Odessa, Soviet Union (now Odesa, Ukraine). His father was Igor Vladimirovich Arnold (1900–1948), a mathematician. His mother was Nina Alexandrovna Arnold (1909–1986, née Isakovich), a Jewish art historian. While a school student, Arnold once asked his father on the reason why the multiplication of two negative numbers yielded a positive number, and his father provided an answer involving the field properties of real numbers and the preservation of the distributive property. Arnold was deeply disappointed with this answer, and developed an aversion to the axiomatic method that lasted through his life. When Arnold was thirteen, his uncle Nikolai B. Zhitkov, who was an engineer, told him about calculus and how it could be used to understand some physical phenomena, this contributed to spark his interest for mathematics, and he started to study by himself the mathematical books his father had left to him, which included some works of Leonhard Euler and Charles Hermite. While a student of Andrey Kolmogorov at Moscow State University and still a teenager, Arnold showed in 1957 that any continuous function of several variables can be constructed with a finite number of two-variable functions, thereby solving Hilbert's thirteenth problem. This is the Kolmogorov–Arnold representation theorem. After graduating from Moscow