At the sharp turns of the 20th century European history

Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin’s life (1883 – 1950) and work of this outstanding Russian mathematician coincided with a very difficult period in Russian history: two World Wars, the 1917 revolutions, the civil war, the construction of a new type of state – the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which included collectivization and industrialization, accompanied by the mass terror that without exception affected all the strata of Soviet society. Against the background of these dramatic events took place the process of formation and flourishing of Luzin the scientist, the creator of one of the leading mathematical schools of the XXth century – the Moscow school of function theory, which became one of the cornerstones in the foundation of the Soviet mathematical school. Luzin’s work could be divided into two periods: the first one comprises the problems regarding the metric theory of functions, culminating in his famous dissertation "Integral and Trigonometric Series" (1915), and the second one which is mainly devoted to the development of problems arising from the theory of analytic sets. The underlying idea of Luzin's research was the problem of the structure of the arithmetic continuum, which became the super task of his work.