In memoriam. Vadim Borisovich Kuznetsov 1963-2005. A scientific biography.

While in theGraduate School at theLeningradUniversity,Vadimcameunder the influence of Professor Igor V. Komarov who instilled in him a lasting interest in the phenomenonof integrability in classical andquantummechanics.Vadim’s firstwork (Komarov & Kuznetsov 1987) gave voice to his remarkable creativity in finding a new explicit formula for the angle variables in the Kowalevski top. Following this Vadim continued, in collaboration with Komarov, to study integrable tops, their generalizations and quantization (Komarov & Kuznetsov 1991a,b). During this period, Vadim became an active member of L. D. Faddeev’s seminar at theLeningradbranch of the SteklovMathematical Institute. Thesewere exciting times; Faddeev’s groupwas enjoying an explosive period of creativity in developing a whole new framework for understanding quantum integrability based on a synthesis of the classical inverse scattering method and the quantum techniques embodied in the Bethe Ansatz, Yang–Baxter equation and quantum groups. In his PhD (Candidate Sci.) thesis (Kuznetsov 1990), Vadim successfully applied the new R-matrix techniques to a generalized separation of variables (SoVs) in integrable systems. This view of ‘SoVs’, understood in a very broad sense, together with the study of integrable systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom became central to much of Vadim’s subsequent research. Samples of work exploiting these ideas are given in Kuznetsov (1992, 1993).