Rouben V. Ambartzumian


Rouben V. Ambartzumian is an Armenian mathematician and Academician of National Academy of Sciences of Armenia. He works in Stochastic Geometry and Integral Geometry where he created a new branch, combinatorial integral geometry. The subject of combinatorial integral geometry received support from mathematicians and D. G. Kendall at the 1976 Sevan Symposium which was sponsored by Royal Society of London and The London Mathematical Society. In the framework of the later theory he solved a number of classical problems in particular the as well as the Hilbert's fourth problem in 1976. He is a holder of the Rollo Davidson Prize of Cambridge University of 1982. Rouben's interest in Integral Geometry was inherited from his father. Nobel prize winner Allan McLeod Cormack Laureate for Tomography wrote: "Ambartsumian gave the first numerical inversion of the Radon transform and it gives the lie to the often made statement that computed tomography would have been impossible without computers". Victor Hambardzumyan, in his book "A Life in Astrophysics", wrote about the work of Rouben V. Ambartzumian, "More recently, it came to my knowledge that the invariance principle or invariant embedding was applied in a purely mathematical field of integral geometry where it gave birth to a novel, combinatorial branch." See R. V. Ambartzumian, «Combinatorial Integral Geometry», John Wiley, 1982.

Experience

The book was positively reviewed in many journals. In particular Ralph Alexander wrote in the Bulletin of the American Math Society the following
"Ambartzumian established a base camp in a little explored area of geometry. From here a number of interesting problems can be seen from a new perspective. With luck a boom town could arise. At the very least this work is a significant contribution to the foundations of integral geometry".
The paper contains a review of the main results of Yerevan research group in planar stochastic geometry, in particular the second order random geometrical processes using the methods of integration of combinatorial decompositions and invariant imbedding.