Vyacheslaw Stepanov entered Moscow University to study mathematics and physics in 1908. He was supervised there by Egorov. He spent some time in Göttingen where he attended lectures by Hilbert and Edmund Landau. He returned to Moscow and, much influenced by Egorov and Luzin, he worked on periodic functions and differential equations.
Stepanov was appointed as lecturer in Moscow in 1915, then from 1928 he became professor. He was appointed Director of the Research Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics from 1939, a post he held until his death.
Harald Bohr had introduced the notion of an almost periodic function and Stepanov constructed and investigated new classes of these functions.
In the theory of differential equations he worked on the general theory of dynamical systems studied by G D Birkhoff. In this area Stepanov extended work by Poincaré.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
February 1997