The legend of Ukrainian mathematics and a woman who became one of the symbols of the indomitable Ukrainian spirit, Nina Opanasivna Virchenko, turned 95 on May 5.
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She is a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, an honored professor at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, a long-time lecturer at the Department of Mathematical Analysis and Probability Theory of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, a full member of the Academy of Sciences of Higher Education of Ukraine, and, from 2004 to 2010, she was Vice President of this Academy. She is the author of more than 500 scientific and scientific-methodological works, including 20 books published in Ukrainian, Russian, English, and Japanese, as well as interesting memoirs and even poems. Incidentally, she signs her poems with the pseudonym UZMA – Ukrainian, woman, mathematician, astronomer.
She is also a passionate patriot, one of those indomitable personalities who fought for our independence from a young age. She spent her youth in captivity: after successfully enrolling in the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Kyiv State University, she was arrested in 1948 on the denunciation of a fellow student, to whom she had not hidden her patriotic views, for allegedly “participating in the Ukrainian nationalist underground.” She spent six long years as a political prisoner in special camps in Eastern Siberia, working in logging. After her release, she taught mathematics, her favorite subject, at a rural school for some time, then re-enrolled at KDU, because her previous years of study had not been counted, but now as a part-time student, and remained under KGB surveillance until 1991. This organization constantly created new obstacles to her studies and scientific activities, but Nina Virchenko still managed to graduate from Kyiv University with flying colors, and later completed her postgraduate studies with early defense of her candidate's dissertation, and worked there until 1973, when she was dismissed “for unreliability.” But in the fall of that same year, she became an associate professor at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, where she defended her doctoral dissertation in 1988, became a professor two years later, and worked for many, many years. Over the years, she has trained and instilled a taste for scientific research in thousands of Ukrainian engineers and scientists, many of whom, thanks to her, were able to realize their potential in their chosen profession and raise their own students.
Nina Virchenko's own scientific research and work focused on problems of generalized analytic functions theory, mixed boundary value problems theory, singular differential equations with partial derivatives, integral equations and special functions, integral transformations, methods for solving problems in mathematical physics, and, of course, the history and methodology of teaching mathematics.
Nina Opanasivna devoted many years of her life to restoring the names of prominent Ukrainian scientists and patriots from oblivion, first and foremost the outstanding Ukrainian mathematician Mykhailo Pylypovych Kravchuk , academician of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, head of the Department of Mathematics at KPI and a number of Kyiv institutes, who died in Kolyma in 1942. It was Nina Virchenko who initiated the establishment of the International Scientific Conferences named after Academician M. Kravchuk at KPI in 1992, which are still held regularly today. In 2008, she published a book about M. Kravchuk, “The Giant of Ukrainian Mathematics” (second edition in 2012), compiled a collection of his popular science articles (2000) and selected mathematical works (2002), the book “The Development of Mathematical Ideas of Mykhailo Kravchuk” (2004), and prepared many materials for various magazines and newspapers (including “Kyiv Polytechnic”). Moreover, on the initiative of Nina Opanasivna and thanks to her persistence, the Mykhailo Kravchuk Auditorium was opened at KPI in 2002, and the following year a monument to the great mathematician by People's Artist of Ukraine Oleksandr Skoblikov was erected on the university grounds, and in 2009, a street named after Mykhailo Kravchuk appeared in Kyiv.
In the preface to her book “Grains from the Roads of My Life...”, she wrote: “...In my youth, maturity, and later years, I lived and continue to live by the spiritual motto: 'Ukraine above all else! Every day, in all circumstances, do something (as much as possible) for Ukraine, for your people!” And these are not empty words: she proved her loyalty to them with her life.