Oleg Lupanov

Who was Oleg Lupanov?

Oleg Borisovich Lupanov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, dean of the Moscow State University's Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, head of the Chair of Discrete Mathematics of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics.

Together with his graduate school advisor, Sergey Vsevolodovich Yablonsky, he is considered one of the founders of the Soviet school of Mathematical Cybernetics. In particular he authored pioneering works on synthesis and complexity of Boolean circuits, and of control systems in general, the term used in the USSR and Russia for a generalization of finite state automata, Boolean circuits and multi-valued logic circuits.

Ingo Wegener, in his book The Complexity of Boolean Functions, credits O. B. Lupanov for coining the term Shannon effect in his 1970 paper, to refer to the fact that almost all Boolean functions have nearly the same circuit complexity as the hardest function.

O. B. Lupanov is best known for his-Lupanov representation of Boolean functions that he used to devise an asymptotically optimal method of Boolean circuit synthesis, thus proving the asymptotically tight upper bound on Boolean circuit complexity: