Valentina Gorbachuk

Valentina Ivanivna Gorbachuk (born 1937) is a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician, specializing in operator theory and partial differential equations.

Education and career

Gorbachuk was born in Mogilev on 25 June 1937; then part of the Soviet Union, it has since become part of Belarus. Her parents worked as an accountant and a telegraphist; in search of better work, they moved to Lutsk in what is now Ukraine when Gorbachuk was a child, and that is where she was schooled.^[1]

She applied to study mathematics and mechanics at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, but was denied because of a "stay in the occupation". Instead, she went to the Lutsk Pedagogical Institute, graduating in 1959. On the advice of one of her faculty mentors there, S.I. Zuhovitsky,^[1] she entered graduate study at the NASU Institute of Mathematics, as a student of Yury Berezansky [uk], earning a candidate degree (the Soviet equivalent of a Ph.D.) in the early 1960s.^[1][2]

She continued as a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics for the rest of her career, defending a Doctor of Science (equivalent of a habilitation under the former Soviet system) in 1992.^[1]

Books

Gorbachuk is the coauthor, with M. L. Gorbachuk, of two books on operator theory, translated from Russian into English:

• Boundary value problems for operator differential equations (Naukova Dumka, 1984; trans., Mathematics and its Applications 48, Kluwer, 1991)^[3]
• M. G. Krein’s lectures on entire operators (Operator Theory: Advances and Applications, 97, Birkhäuser, 1997)^[4]

Recognition

In 1998, Gorbachuk won the State Prize of Ukraine in Science and Technology.^[1]

Personal life

Gorbachuk worked closely with her husband, Miroslav L'vovich Gorbachuk [uk] (1938–2017), a mathematician with whom she shared her research interests.^[1] Their son, Volodymyr Myroslavovich Gorbachuk, is an associate professor of mathematical physics at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (National Technical University of Ukraine).^[1][5]