Aleksei Fedorovich Filippov

Who is Aleksei Fedorovich Filippov?

Aleksei Fedorovich Filippov is a Russian mathematician, who worked on differential equations, differential inclusions, diffraction theory, and numerical methods.

A. F. Filippov was born in Moscow in 1923. After serving in the Red Army during the Second World War he attended Moscow State University. After graduating from the university in 1950, he worked there until his death in 2006. He got his Ph.D. under the supervision of I. G. Petrovsky.

He is the author of a well-known exercise book in ordinary differential equations for students, which is used in Moscow State University and many others Russian universities during several decades. His monography On stability of difference equations is one of the first books in this field. In 1959 he published a paper containing a lemma designed for use in the optimal control theory, which is named after him. He made an important contribution in the theory of discontinuous ordinary differential equations in his monography Differential Equations with Discontinuous Righthand Sides. Such set-valued dynamical systems arise in sliding-mode systems, some mechanical systems with Coulomb friction, and more recently models of genetic networks.