Sadovnichiy was born in the village of
Krasnopavlovka in
Kharkov Oblast (now in
Ukraine) to worker Anton Grigoryevich and collective farmer Anna Matveyevna.
Study After graduating from rural school, Sadovnichiy worked for some time at the Komsomolets coal mine in
Gorlovka (
Donetsk Oblast) and studied at night school, from which he graduated with honors. In an interview, he said that he planned to enter the
Belarusian State Agricultural Academy, but on the advice of a friend, in 1958, he entered the
MSU Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. In 1963, he graduated with honors with a degree in mathematics. Sadovnichiy was sent to graduate school and graduated in 1966, defending his PhD thesis on 17 March 1967 (topic: "Regularized sums of eigenvalues of general problems for ordinary differential equations"). He was a student of
Anatoly Kostyuchenko. After graduate school, he remained as an
assistant.
Early career Sadovnichiy defended his
doctoral thesis in 1974 (topic: "On some issues in the theory of ordinary differential equations depending on the spectral parameter"). In 1975, he became Professor. In 1981-1982, he headed the Department of
Functional Analysis and Its Applications,
MSU Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics. He worked at Moscow State University in the following positions: deputy dean of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics for scientific work, deputy vice-rector, vice-rector (1982-1984), and first vice-rector (1984-1992).
Rectorship of the MSU On 23 March 1992, Sadovnichiy was elected rector of Moscow State University on an alternative basis and re-elected in 1996, 2001, and 2005 (uncontested). Sadovnichiy has been a corresponding member of the
Russian Academy of Sciences since 1994, a full member since 1997, and a member of the
Academy's Presidium. In 1989, he was awarded with the
USSR State Prize. From 2008 to 2013, he was Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Doctor Emeritus of universities worldwide and the author of some 150 works. Sadovnichiy is President of the
Russian Union of Rectors (since 1994), President of the
Moscow Society of Naturalists (since 2000), and Chairman of the
Russian Council of School Olympiads. Member of the Board of Trustees of the Russian Academy of Education. Sadovnichiy is a member of the editorial board of scientific journals
Problem Analysis and Public Management Design,
Quantum Computers and Quantum Computing (editor-in-chief),
Higher Education in Russia, and
Fundamental and Applied Mathematics. Under the scientific supervision of Sadovnichiy, more than 65 candidate's and 15 doctoral dissertations (including scientists from other countries) were prepared. In November 2011, bas-relief portraits of outstanding university rectors were installed in the rotunda of the
main building of Moscow State University:
Alexander Nesmeyanov,
Ivan Petrovsky, and Sadovnichiy. In 2022, he was the lead signature on the
Address of the Russian Union of Rectors, which called to support
Putin in his
invasion of Ukraine.
World financial economic crisis In their co-authored article “On the Possibilities to Forecast the Current Crisis and its Second Wave” (with
Askar Akaev and
Andrey Korotayev) in the Russian academic journal “Ekonomicheskaya politika” (December 2010. Issue 6. Pages 39–46 Клиодинамика - математические методы в истории) the three authors published «a forecast of
the second wave of the crisis, which suggested that it may start in July — August, 2011». ==Honours and awards==