Nikolai Kapitonovich Nikolski (Николай Капитонович Никольский, sometimes transliterated as Nikolskii, born 16 November 1940)[1] is a Russian mathematician, specializing in real and complex analysis and functional analysis.
Nikolski received in 1966 his Candidate of Sciences degree (PhD) from the Leningrad State University under Viktor Khavin with thesis Invariant subspaces of certain compact operators (title translated from Russian).[2] In 1973 he received his Doctor of Sciences degree (habilitation). He was an academician at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Leningrad and taught at Leningrad State University. In the 1990s he became a professor at the University of Bordeaux.
Nikolski's research deals with operator theory, harmonic analysis, and complex analysis.
He was an Invited Speaker with talk What problems do spectral theory and functional analysis solve for each other? at the ICM in 1978 in Helsinki. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
His doctoral students include Nikolai Makarov, Sergei Treil, and Alexander Volberg.
Nikolski was one of the Leningrad mathematicians who in 1984 verified the correctness of the proof of the Bieberbach conjecture by Louis de Branges.