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Anatoly Illarionovich Shirshov
(8 August 1921 - 28 February 1981), a Soviet mathematician, algebraist; a corresponding member of Academy of Science in USSR.

Biography
Anatoly was born on the 8th of August of 1921 in the village Kolyvan near Novosibirsk. Before the II World War he started to study mathematics at Tomsk State University, then he went to the front to fight as a volunteer. In 1946 he continued hist study at Voroshilovgrad Pedagogical Institute and at the same time taught mathematics at a secondary school. In 1950 Shirshov was accepted as a graduate student at the Moscow State University under the supervision of A.G. Kurosh. In 1953 he has successfully defended his Candidate of Science thesis (analog of a Ph.D.) "Some problems in the theory of nonassociative rings and algebras" and joined the Department of Higher Algebra at the Moscow Satet University. In 1958 Shirshov was awarded the Doctor of Science degree for the thesis "On some classes of rings that are nearly associative".

In 1960 Shirshov moved to Novosibirsk (at the invitations of S.L. Sobolev and A.I. Malcev) to become one of the founders of Sobolev Institute of Mathematics and to help the formation of the new Novosibirsk State University. From 1970 to 1973 he was a deputy director of the Institute and till his last days Anatoly led the research in the theory of algebras at the Institute.

Scientific contribution
Anatoly Shirshov was a pioneer in several directions of associative, Lie, Jordan, and alternative algebras, as well as groups and projective planes. His name is associated with notions and results on Gröbner-Shirshov bases, the Composition-Diamond Lemma, the Shirshov-Witt Theorem, the Lazard-Shirshov elimination process, Shirshov's Height Theorem, Lyndon-Shirshov words, Hall-Shirshov bases, Shirshov's Theorem on the Kurosh problem for alternative and Jodan algebras, and Shirshov's Theorem on the speciality of Jordan algebras with two generators. Shirshov's ideas were used by his student Efim Zelmanov for the solution of the Restricted Burnside Problem.