Victor Abramovich Zalgaller will celebrate his ninetieth birthday
on December 25, 2010.
Zalgaller combines the merits of a philanthropist and a geometer.
He is a block of the rock
of love and respect to humans' gifts and talents,
a citizen of the world, and a soldier of the Victory.
Zalgaller has carried the burden of arduous, irksome, and never-ending
man's toil. Zalgaller has always been painstaking and self-sacrificing
when he headed a students' circle, wrote a scientific article, or
battled at a party meeting.
Exerting his creativity, Zalgaller has ground the diamonds in the rough
of his teachers and friends
Alexander Alexandrov and Leonid Kantorovich.
Without Zalgaller, neither linear programming nor convex geometry
could ever become so popular and acclaimed branches of science as they
are welcome throughout the world these days.
Zalgaller is intellectually impeccable and reserved.
He is open-minded and hates anything malign. He is exquisitely cultivated,
has charms, ways, lofty principles, and
intolerance to louts and brutes.
Culture survives by example.
Zalgaller porters the luggage of fragile intellectual treasures of Saint Petersburg
to the future.
How happy we are to indulge the exploits of Victor Abramovich in
enlightening and embellishing so many roads of humans in life.
© Kutateladze S. S. 2010
