Volodymyr Olexandrovych Marchenko (; 7 July 1922 â 1 January 2026) was a Ukrainian mathematician who specialised in mathematical physics.
Marchenko was born in Kharkiv on 7 July 1922. He defended his PhD thesis in 1948 under the supervision of Naum Landkof, and in 1951, he defended his DSc thesis. He worked in Kharkiv University until 1961. For four decades, he headed the Mathematical Physics Department at the Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
He was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1962, the N.N. Krylov Prize in 1980, the State Prize of Ukraine in Science and Technology in 1989, and the N. N. Bogolyubov prize in 1996. Since 1969 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, since 1987 of the Russian Academy of Sciences and since 2001 of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.
Marchenko turned 100 on 7 July 2022, and died on 1 January 2026, at the age of 103.
Marchenko made fundamental contributions to the analysis of the SturmâÂÂLiouville operators. He introduced one of the approaches to the inverse scattering problem for SturmâÂÂLiouville operators, and derived what is now called the Marchenko equation.
Together with Leonid Pastur, Volodymyr Marchenko discovered the MarchenkoâÂÂPastur law in random matrix theory.
Together with E. Ya. Khruslov, Marchenko authored one of the first mathematical books on homogenization.