Tel:    790 8099
E-mail: yakub@math.kth.se

Vladimir Yakubovich was born in Novosibirsk, Russia, in 1926. He was a student of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow University from 1946 to 1949. In 1949 he received the first prize for student scientific work and was recommended by two chairs (those of I. M. Gelfand and V. V. Nemyzki) for postgraduate education but was refused at the request of Comsomol and the Communist Party (after he had protested against discrimination of Jewish students in admittance to postgraduate studies). In 1953, after having worked for some time in industry as an engineer, he received the Candidate of Science degree (PhD), and then he served as an Assistant and an Associate Professor at Leningrad Mining Institute. From 1956 to present time he has been associated with St. Petersburg University (formerly Leningrad University), where in 1959 he received the Doctor of Science Degree. He became a (full) Professor of Mathematics in 1963 and head of the Theoretical Cybernetics Chair in 1971.

He is the author of more than 250 papers and coauthor of seven books in different areas of mathematics, especially applied mathematics and control theory. He has worked in parametric resonance theory (extending and improving some Lyapunov results), in the theory of stability of nonlinear systems, and in optimization theory. He introduced a method of ``recursive aim inequalities'' in the theory of adaptive systems, and an abstract theory of optimal control, extending the Pontrjagin maximum principle to many new cases. The ``Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov Lemma'' connects two areas of control theory, frequency methods and Lyaponov methods, and it is also of importance in stochastic realization theory. His main results in recent years concern new aspects of linear-quadratic optimization problems.

Yakubovich has served on the editorial boards of Siberian Mathematical Journal (1973-1980), Systems and Control Letters (1981-1988) and Dynamics and Control (since 1990). He has served on many scientific committees and is a member of several scientific societies in Russia. In 1991 he was awarded the Norbert Wiener Prize by the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Since 1991 he is a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and since 1992 a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Science.