Born: 23 December 1872 in Sokyryntsi, Pryluka, Poltava gubernia, Ukraine

Died: 10 October 1946 in Kiev, Ukraine

Georgii Pfeiffer graduated from the University of Kiev in 1896. He was appointed to the Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 1899 and he taught there until 1909. While holding this appointment he was also appointed to the University of Kiev in 1900 and he taught there until his death in 1946.

Elected to the Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine in 1920, Pfeiffer chaired the Commission on Pure Mathematics from that time.

Pfeiffer was also attached to the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine in Kiev during two periods, namely 1934 to 1941 and again from 1944 until his death in 1946. In the three years between these, namely 1941-44, Pfeiffer was in Ufa, the capital of the Bashkortostan republic in western Russia. In Ufa, Pfeiffer was Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Physics.

Pfeiffer did important work on partial differential equations following on from the methods developed by Lie and Lagrange. He showed how to find integrals of a general system of partial differential equations by using sequential complete systems instead of passing to Jacobian systems. Pfeiffer also constructed all the infinitesimal operators of a system of equations.

Articles:

1. L V Koval'chuk, On Pfeiffer's generalization of Jacobi's method (Russian), in Sketches on the history of mathematical physics 184 'Naukova Dumka' (Kiev, 1985), 53-61.
2. V Koval'chuk, The life and scientific activity of academician G V Pfeiffer (Russian), in On the history of the mathematical sciences 167 'Naukova Dumka' (Kiev, 1984), 39-43.
3. O Volkova, Algebraic geometry in the works of G V Pfeiffer (Ukrainian), Visnik Kiev. Univ. 12 (1970), 114-120