Anatoly Karatsuba

Who is Anatoly Karatsuba?

Anatoly Alexeevitch Karatsuba was a Russian mathematician working in the field of analytic number theory, p-adic numbers and Dirichlet series.

For most of his student and professional life he was associated with the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, defending a D.Sc. there entitled "The method of trigonometric sums and intermediate value theorems" in 1966. He later held a post at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences.

His textbook "Foundations of analytic number theory" went to two editions, 1975 and 1983.

His eponymous algorithm is a fast procedure for multiplying large numbers, a divide and conquer algorithm later asymptotically improved by the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm. The Karatsuba algorithm is the earliest known divide and conquer algorithm for multiplication and lives on as a special case of the Toom–Cook algorithm.

The main research works of Anatoly Karatsuba were published in more than 160 research papers and monographs.