Professor Emmanuil El’evich Shnol’ was born on August 26, 1928. His Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Prof I.M. Gel'fand was devoted to the study of the spectrum and eigenfunctions of the Sturm-Liouville problem.
Shnol’s main research interests for many years concerned stability theory in dynamical systems. He discovered that the presence of resonance can lead to the stabilization of an equilibrium position which in the absence of resonance is unstable. For the case of 1:3 resonance it was proven that there is no single algebraic stability criterion.
In 1957 Shnol’ started to work at the Institute of Applied Mathematics (IAM) of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His research activity at the IAM was very diverse. It included the development of numerical methods for two-dimensional problems of gas dynamics particularly a calculation of the boundary layer in air; studying the gravitational stability of a gas ball with a density jump and pioneering research in molecular dynamics.
In the early 1970s Professors Albert Molchanov and Emmanuel Shnol’ founded a new institute to conduct research on mathematical and computational biology (currently the Institute of Mathematical Problems of Biology (IMPB)) at the Pushchino Biological Centre of the Academy of Sciences. Within IMPB Shnol’ has organised and led a Laboratory of Numerical Methods which for a number of years has incubated many new research directions. In the mid-1970s Shnol’ initiated and headed a project on numerical methods and software for analysing bifurcations in dynamical systems. This subsequently became one of the key areas at IMPB and led to the development of bifurcation software, “LOCBIF”.
Another important area of Shnol’s activity is his pedagogical work. For example, a brochure “Functions and graphs”, written by Shnol’ in collaboration with I.M. Gelfand and E.G. Glagoleva has served as a brilliant introduction to mathematics for generations of schoolchildren both in Russia and elsewhere after it was translated into other languages.
Scholarpedia articles:
- Stability of equilibria. Scholarpedia, 2(3):2770. (2007)
- Chetaev function. Scholarpedia, 2(9):4672. (2007)
(Author profile by Roman M. Borisyuk)
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