Andrei Aleksandrovich Gonchar November 21, 1931-October 10, 2012

Andrei Aleksandrovich Gonchar was born on November 21, 1931, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia. He graduated from Moscow State (Lomonosov) University (MSU) in 1954. Under the supervision of S.N. Mergelyan, he defended his Candidate’s (Ph.D.) thesis at the same university in 1957, and then his doctoral dissertation (D.Sc.) at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow in 1964. From 1972 until 2002 he was the head of the Department of Complex Analysis at the same Steklov Institute. He became corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Science in 1974 and was elected to full membership in 1987 (Fig. 1). Gonchar’s contributions involve a wide circle of problems in rational and harmonic approximations, convergence of continued fractions, the study of classes of quasi-analytic