Eugene Borisovich Dynkin (; 11 May 1924 – 14 November 2014) was a Soviet and American mathematician. He made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes. The Dynkin diagram, the Dynkin system, and Dynkin's lemma are named after him. Biography Dynkin was born into a Jewish family, living in Leningrad until 1935, when his family was exiled to Kazakhstan. Two years later, when Dynkin was 13, his father disappeared in the Gulag. Moscow University At the age of 16, in 1940, Dynkin was admitted to Moscow University. He avoided military service in World War II because of his poor eyesight, and received his MS in 1945 and his PhD in 1948. He became an assistant professor at Moscow, but was not awarded a "chair" until 1954 because of his political undesirability. His academic progress was made difficult due to his father's fate, as well as Dynkin's Jewish origin; the special efforts of Andrey Kolmogorov, his PhD supervisor, made it possible for Dynkin to progress through graduate school into a teaching position. USSR Academy of Sciences In 1968, Dynkin was forced to transfer from the Moscow University to the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He worked there on the theory of economic growth and economic equilibrium. Cornell He remained at the Institute until 1976, when he emigrated to the United States. In 1977, he became a professor at Cornell University. Death Dynkin died at the Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, New York, aged 90. Dynkin was an atheist. Mathematical work Dynkin is considered to be a rare example of a mathematician who made fundamental contributions to two very distinct areas of mathematics: algebra and probability theory. The algebraic period of Dynkin's mathematical work was between 1944 and 1954, though even during this time a probabilistic theme was noticeable. Indeed, Dynkin's first publication was in 1945, jointly with N. A. Dmitriev, solved a problem on the eigenvalues of stochastic matrices. This problem was raised at Kolmogorov's seminar on Markov chains, while both Dynkin and Dmitriev were undergraduates. Lie Theory While Dynkin was a student at Moscow University, he attended Israel Gelfand's seminar on Lie groups. In 1944, Gelfand asked him to prepare a survey on the structure and classification of semisimple Lie groups, based on the papers by Hermann Weyl and Bartel Leendert van der Waerden. Dynkin