Mathwar/Personlist/Krein Mark
Mark Krein
(* April 3rd 1907 in Kiev, † October 17th 1989 in Odessa)
Life
In 1941 Krein had to leave Odessa when the university was evacuated as the German armies advanced. He was appointed as professor of theoretical mechanics at Kuibyshev Industrial Institute but he returned to Odessa in 1944. However, soon after taking up his post again he was dismissed.
Krein was not reinstated, however, but held the chair of theoretical mechanics at Odessa Marine Engineering Institute from 1944. Also from 1944, he held a part-time post as head of the functional analysis and algebra department at the Mathematical Institute of the Ukranian Academy of Science in Kiev. This latter position came to a sudden end in 1952 when he was dismissed for a second time. Officially the reason given was that he did not live in Kiev, but in reality it seems more likely that the accusation of Jewish nationalism in his classified file was again the reason.
Although the 1940s must have been difficult times for Krein, his mathematical research did not suffer. Among other important work, Krein wrote eight papers on harmonic analysis and representation theory in the 1940s. In these papers he studied the use of algebras of operators applied to obtain results on positive definite kernels and functions. He also studied analysis on homogeneous spaces and duality theorems.
From 1954 until his retirement Krein occupied the chair of theoretical mechanics at the Odessa Civil Engineering Institute. During the 1940s and 1950s there were many unsuccessful attempts to have Krein and his students reinstated at Odessa University but all attempts failed.