Thirty years after: insights on the cultural origins of Kolmogorov's 1954 theorem from a short conversation with Arnold

Abstract

Among the impressive contributions of Andrej N. Kolmogorov's to mathematics in the 20th century, his 1954 invariant tori theorem is still little understood from a historical point of view [Dumas 2014]. Vladimir I. Arnold, who entered Moscow State University that same year and would became a student of Kolmogorov, 30 years after asked him about the origin of a research program to which Arnold himself gave a big contribution. In this paper we compare and put in historical and biographical context two different account's by Arnold on this conversation.