Viktor Pavlovich Maslov (Russian: Виктор Павлович Маслов; 15 June 1930 – 3 August 2023) was a Russian mathematical physicist. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He obtained his doctorate in physico-mathematical sciences in 1957. His main fields of interest were quantum theory, idempotent analysis, non-commutative analysis, superfluidity, superconductivity, and phase transitions. He was editor-in-chief of Mathematical Notes and Russian Journal of Mathematical Physics. The Maslov index is named after him. He also introduced the concept of Lagrangian submanifold.
Early life and career Viktor Pavlovich Maslov was born in Moscow on 15 June 1930. He was the son of statistician Pavel Maslov and researcher Izolda Lukomskaya, and the grandson of the economist and agriculturalist Petr Maslov. At the beginning of World War II, he was evacuated to Kazan with his mother, grandmother and other members of his mother's family. In 1953 he graduated from the Physics Department of the Moscow State University and taught at the university. In 1957 he defended his Ph.D. thesis and in 1966, his doctoral dissertation. In 1984, he was elected an academician within Department of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1968 to 1998, he headed the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics. From 1992 to 2016, he was in charge of the Department of Quantum Statistics and Field Theory of the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University. Maslov headed the laboratory of the mechanics of natural disasters at the Institute for Problems in Mechanics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a research professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics at Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics of Higher School of Economics.
Scientific activity Maslov was known as a prominent specialist in the field of mathematical physics, differential equations, functional analysis, mechanics and quantum physics. He developed asymptotic methods that are widely applied to equations arising in quantum mechanics, field theory, statistical physics and abstract mathematics, that bear his name. Maslov's asymptotic methods are closely related to such problems as the theory of a self-consistent field in quantum and classical statistics, superfluidity and superconductivity, quantization of solitons, quantum field theory in strong external fields and in curved space-time, the method of expansion in the inverse number of particle types. In 1983, he attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw, where he presented a plenary report "Non-standard characteristics of asymptotic problems". Maslov dealt with the problems of liquid and gas, carried out fundamental research on the problems of magnetohydrodynamics related to the dynamo problem. He also made calculations for the emergency unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during the 1986 disaster. In 1991, he made model and forecasts of the economic situation in Russia. From the early 1990s, he worked on the use of equations of mathematical physics in economics and financial analysis. In particular, he managed to predict the 1998 Russian financial crisis, and even earlier, the collapse of the economic and, as a consequence, the collapse of the political system of the USSR. In 2008, Maslov in his own words predicted a global recession in the late 2000s. He calculated the critical number of U.S. debt, and found out that a crisis should break out in the near future. In the calculations, he used equations similar to the equations of phase transition in physics. In the mid-1980s, Maslov introduced the term tropical mathematics, in which the operations of the conditional optimization problem were considered.
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