Akiva Yaglom was born on 6 March 1921 in
Kharkiv,
Ukraine to the family of an engineer. He had a twin brother
Isaak. The family moved to
Moscow when the Yaglom brothers were five years old. During their school years they were keen on mathematics. In 1938 they shared the first prize at the Moscow mathematical competition for schoolchildren. After he received his Ph.D., Yaglom was offered a job at the
Lebedev Physical Institute by the future Nobel laureates
Igor Tamm and
Vitaly Ginzburg, but he declined the offer because he knew that the job would have required him to deal with applied problems related to the development of
nuclear weapons. He joined in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences and worked at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Turbulence and worked there for more than 45 years. In 1955, he defended his second doctoral thesis "The Theory of Correlation between Continuous Processes and Fields with Applications to the Problems of Statistical Exploration of Time Series and to Turbulence Theory". Yaglom was also a full professor in the Faculty of Probability Theory at the Mathematics and Mechanics Department of Moscow State University. In 1992, Yaglom went to the United States and joined the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He died in
Boston,
Massachusetts on 13 December 2007. ==Principal works==