Introduction
Boris Levitan (7 June 1914 – 4 April 2004) was a mathematician known in particular for his work on almost periodic functions, and Sturm–Liouville operators, especially, on inverse scattering.
Life
Boris Levitan was born in Berdyansk (south-eastern Ukraine), and grew up in Kharkiv. He graduated from Kharkov University in 1936; in 1938, he submitted his PhD thesis "Some Generalization of Almost Periodic Function" under the supervision of Naum Akhiezer. Then he defended the habilitation thesis "Theory of Generalized Translation Operators".
He was drafted into the army at the beginning of World War II in 1941, and served until 1944. From 1944 to 1961 he worked at the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy, and from 1961 in Moscow University. During the last years of his life, he worked in the University of Minnesota.