Ualbai Utmakhanbetovich Umirbaev

Ualbai Utmakhanbetovich Umirbaev, doctor of the physical and mathematical sciences, professor, academician of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan, laureate of the Moore Prize of the American Mathematical Society, laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Kazakhstan, was born on 9 May 1960 in the village of Tortkul’ in the South-Kazakhstan Oblast. His father Utmakhanbet, a veteran of World War II, worked for a long time as the editor of the newspaper of the Shayan District of the South-Kazakhstan Oblast, then was the director of a secondary school in Tortkul’ and taught mathematics to senior school students. His mother Bibizukhra was a team-leader at the harvests, including during the difficult war years, and as a reward for her work she was invited to Moscow in 1940 as a participant of the USSR Agricultural Exhibition. Everyone in the Umirbaev family was enthusiastic about mathematics and chess. After Ualbai’s sixth year at school, his father took him to a summer camp of the republic’s Physics-Mathematics School in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, where he successfully passed examinations and enrolled in the best school in the Kazakh Republic. Mathematics was taught there by such excellent pedagogues as D. Zh. Erzhanov and K.E. Tolymbekova, who fascinated their students by interesting and at the same time difficult problems from various sources, including the journal Kvant. In 1977 Ualbai enrolled in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Novosibirsk State University. Novosibirsk Akademgorodok made a strong impression on him. All the conditions for life, leisure, and scientific research work had been created here for lecturers and students. Extensive woodlands, numerous parklands, proximity to the Ob Sea reservoir — all this made Akademgorodok even more attractive. There were always many interesting activities being conducted in the House of Scientists, in the Culture House “Akademiya”, and in the University itself. Lectures were given by well-known scientists from various research institutes of the Siberian