In Memory of Evgeny Abramovich Pechersky (1937 – 2025)

Pablo A. Ferrari, A. V. Logachov, Yu.M. Suhov, A.A. Yambartsev

2025, v.31, Issue 3-4, 173-175

ABSTRACT

Evgeny Abramovich Pechersky was born in Leningrad into the family of a
military veterinary doctor. His childhood fell on the years of the Second World
War, which for an entire generation of children became a period of early growing
up. In the pre-war years, the family moved frequently, and the outbreak of the
war found them in the west, in the Lviv region. He returned more than once to
these events in conversations recorded by Olga Kindisheva in final years of his
life. These recollections preserve vivid, almost tangible episodes of that time:
the sudden evacuation, bombings, the long journey eastward with his mother,
and the forced relocations during the difficult war years – the Saratov region,
Central Asia, Tashkent.
His father went through the entire war of 1941–1945 and returned home after
its end. Their first meeting after a long separation was so unexpected that the
father and the son did not immediately recognize each other.
The first post-war years were spent in Ukraine; later, in his early adoles-
cence, the family moved to Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan), where his interests
and character took shape. There he completed the high school and graduated
from the Azerbaijan Polytechnic Institute, receiving an engineering education.
However, even during these years, a growing inclination toward more abstract
knowledge became apparent, eventually leading him to mathematics. Evgeny
Abramovich later recalled that, like many engineers of that time, he believed
that mathematics could solve most engineering problems.
In 1959, Evgeny Abramovich moved to Novosibirsk – one of the major centers
of Soviet science at the time – and witnessed the creation of Akademgorodok.
He combined a work in a design bureau with studies at the evening division
of Novosibirsk State University (NSU), which he completed with distinction.
Moving to work at NSU, he fulfilled his dream of pursuing mathematics pro-
fessionally. Later, he would recall with some astonishment how he managed to
work, study, and endure the Siberian climate so different from that of Baku.
The initial period of Pechersky’s scientific career was primarily associated
with the Novosibirsk school of probability theory. In 1975, he defended his
Candidate of Sciences dissertation (an equivalent of a PhD Thesis) under the
supervision of A.A. Borovkov and L.Ya. Saveliev. His early research, carried out
in collaboration with A.A. Borovkov, B.A. Rogozin, A.A. Mogulskii and other
representatives of this school, defined the broad range of his scientific interests.
From late 1970s onward, Pechersky’s research was associated with the Moscow
Seminar in mathematical physics run by R. L. Dobrushin, V. A. Malyshev,
R.A. Minlos and Y.G. Sinai at Moscow State University. In late 1980s he
joined the Institute for Information Transmission Problems in Moscow, where
he worked in The Dobrushin Laboratory. He later recalled that it was there
that he finally found his perfect place after a long search. His research inter-
ests of this period covered the large deviation theory and the theory of Gibbs
random fields. In a joint work with R.L. Dobrushin, a large deviation principle
was obtained for processes with independent increments in a form convenient
for applications to queueing systems. In other works, he studied asymptotic
probabilities of rare events in various queueing models.
Pechersky also made a significant contribution to the theory of Gibbs ran-
dom fields: in particular, he established a uniqueness criterion for Gibbs states
in models with general spin spaces. A number of his papers focused on applica-
tions of these ideas to image-processing problems. These studies received a high
degree of recognition and largely determined the citation impact of his research.
In these works one can see, perhaps in the most clear form, a combination of
Pechersky’s original engineering vision and his exceptional mathematical exper-
tise. It is no coincidence that the present issue opens with a paper by X. De-
scombes, M. Sigelle and F. Tupin, his co-authors in these works, who recollect
the main results of their joint research.
In a broader context, Pechersky’s life trajectory was in many ways typical
of that generation of Soviet scientists. Having been raised within the gigantic
scientific infrastructure of the Soviet Union, he, like many of his colleagues,
found himself in the new reality of the 1990s, to which one had to adapt. In
the subsequent years, he held visiting professorships at universities in several
countries, notably in France and Ireland. From 1999 until the 2019 pandemic,
he regularly visited Brazil. The first special issue also includes contributions
from Brazilian colleagues who knew him well and retain warm memories of his
personality and scientific engagement.
Evgeny Abramovich Pechersky belonged to the group of mathematicians
whose scientific biographies have been shaped by traditions of the Soviet schools
of probability theory, particularly in Novosibirsk and Moscow. More broadly, he
personified a specific culture of Soviet mathematical science. The memory of him
will continue living in his works and in the reminiscences of his many colleagues,
students and friends. We would like to thank all authors who responded to our
invitation to contribute to this special issue dedicated to his memory. The
response exceeded our expectations, making it possible to prepare additional
issues, which we plan to publish in the near future.

Keywords: In Memory of Evgeny Abramovich Pechersky

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