Yuri Abramovich

(1945-2003)

I met Yuri Abramovich at a Wabash seminar meeting in 1995. I was a graduate student in Urbana then. During a break between talks, Yuri introduced me to some open problems related to invariant subspaces of positive operators on Banach lattices. I got interested in the topic, and that's how our collaboration and friendship started. Shortly after that he kindly agreed to become my "external" research advisor (Peter Loeb was my "local" advisor). Once a week I would drive to Indianapolis to see Yuri. We would spend several hours talking about mathematics, have a lunch, and attend our seminar. Together with Roko Aliprantis and Owen Burkinshaw, Yuri was running a small working seminar for their graduate students. I learned a lot during those visits. I think I learned more during these visits than many people get from their "local" advisors. Yuri was a great teacher, our discussions were always most encouraging for me. Yuri and his wife Alla would often invite me to visit them at their place. I enjoyed their hospitality and our most interesting conversations.

After I graduated and left Midwest, Yuri would call me every couple of weeks to check on my progress. And I would often call Yuri for advice. I am happy that I got a chance to know Yuri and to be his student and his friend.

Yuri's main research interest was in the theory of operators on Banach lattices. During the last years Yuri was involved in several major research projects. I would only mention four of them:

a series of papers on the Invariant Subspace Problem for operators on Banach lattices together with Roko Aliprantis and Owen Burkinshaw;
a series of papers with Antony Wickstead on regular operators;
a series of papers with Arkady Kitover on disjointness preserving operators;
Together with Roko Aliprantis, Yuri wrote a book "An invitation to operator theory" and a companion problem book "Problems in operator theory".

Yuri was an editor and one of the organizers of the journnal Positivity. He was a referee in many respectable journals. Yuri was one of the organizers of the Positivity meetings.

Yuri had many friends in mathematical community and beyond it. Yuri's wife Alla did enormous job of supporting Yuri during difficult periods of his life, especially during his fight with cancer.

St. Petersburg Mathematical Society has a web page with information about Yuri.

Bibliography: mathematical papers authored by Yuri Abramovich.

In memory of Yuri, the Department of Mathematics at IUPUI has established the Yuri Abramovich Memorial Scholarship. Memorial contributions to this scholarship fund may be made to the IUPUI Department of Mathematical Sciences. Click here for an article in Yuri's memory at IUPUI web site.

Several pictures of Yuri. Click on the pictures for pictures of higher resolution.

Yuri with Roko Aliprantis.