
In Memory of Alexander N. Gorban (1952–2025)
Alexander Nikolaevich Gorban, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leicester, passed away on 21 September 2025 at the age of 73.
Born in Omsk in 1952, he studied at Novosibirsk State University and the Omsk Pedagogical Institute before beginning a distinguished career with the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Krasnoyarsk. He rose to lead the Laboratory of Non-Equilibrium Systems at the Institute of Computational Modeling and later became Deputy Director of the Institute. In 2004, he was appointed Professor at Leicester, UK, where he directed the Centre for Mathematical Modeling. Professor Gorban published some 20 books and nearly
300 papers, supervised many PhD students, and was widely recognized for his major contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, kinetics, complex systems, machine learning, and data analysis. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, especially in the field of neural networks. In the late 1980s and 1990s, his work on training neural networks provided some of the very few Russian contributions that were not only original in methodology but also highly valuable for education. He was a founder of the Russian Neural Network Society and its main annual conference with international participation.
Beyond his scientific achievements, Professor Gorban was an erudite, sagacious colleague, and a mentor with a great sense of humor, whose intellectual breadth and clarity of thought inspired collaborators worldwide. His passing is a profound loss to the international scientific community and the INNS.
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