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It is with sorrow that ICTP learned of the passing of Ludvig Faddeev on February 27, at the age of 82. The Russian mathematician and theoretical physicist was awarded ICTP's Dirac Medal in 1990, and was the recipient of many other awards throughout his career, including the Max Planck Medal and the Shaw Prize.
Faddeev worked mainly in the mathematics of high energy physics. He made major contributions to the quantum inverse scattering method for studying quantum integrable systems in one space and one time dimension, quantum theory of solitons and the theory of quantum groups. He's also known for being the first person to solve the three body quantum problem of quantum mechanics, with what are now know as the Faddeev equations.
He was born in St. Petersburg in 1934, to two mathematicians. He completed his PhD in physics, with a strong education in mathematics, under Olga Ladyzhenskaya in 1959. From 1976 to 2000, Faddeev was head of the St. Petersburg Department of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and was a member of many national academies of science.
ICTP is grateful for Faddeev's mathematical and physics expertise, collaboration, and generosity in teaching.
