Victor Zalgaller

Victor (Viktor) Abramovich Zalgaller (ויקטור אבּרמוביץ' זלגלר; Виктор Абрамович Залгаллер; 25 December 1920 – 2 October 2020) was a Russian-Israeli mathematician in the fields of geometry and optimization. He is best known for the results he achieved on convex polyhedra, linear and dynamic programming, isoperimetry, and differential geometry.

Biography
Zalgaller was born in Parfino, Novgorod Governorate on 25 December 1920. In 1936, he was one of the winners of the Leningrad Mathematics Olympiads for high school students. He started his studies at the Leningrad State University, however, World War II intervened in 1941, and Zalgaller joined the Red Army. He took part in the defence of Leningrad, and in 1945 marched into Germany.

He worked as a teacher at the Saint Petersburg Lyceum 239, and received his 1963 doctoral dissertation on polyhedra with the aid of his high school students who wrote the computer programs for the calculation.

Zalgaller did his early work under direction of A. D. Alexandrov and Leonid Kantorovich. He wrote joint monographs with both of them. His later monograph Geometric Inequalities (joint with Yu. Burago) is still the main reference in the field.

Zalgaller lived in Saint Petersburg most of his life, having studied and worked at the Leningrad State University and the Steklov Institute of Mathematics (Saint Petersburg branch).

In 1999, he immigrated to Israel. Zalgaller died on 2 October 2020 at the age of 99.