Ruben Hambardzumyan

The subject of combinatorial integral geometry received support from mathematicians K. Krickeberg and D. G. Kendall at the 1976 Sevan Symposium (Armenia) which was sponsored by Royal Society of London and The London Mathematical Society. In the framework of the later theory he solved a number of classical problems in particular the solution to the Buffon Sylvester problem as well as Hilbert's fourth problem in 1976. He is a holder of the Rollo Davidson Prize of Cambridge University of 1982. Rouben's interest in Integral Geometry was inherited from his father. Nobel Prize winner Allan McLeod Cormack wrote: "Ambartsumian gave the first numerical inversion of the Radon transform and it gives the lie to the often made statement that computed tomography would have been impossible without computers". Victor Hambardzumyan, in his book "A Life in Astrophysics", wrote about the work of Rouben V. Ambartzumian, "More recently, it came to my knowledge that the invariance principle or invariant embedding was applied in a purely mathematical field of integral geometry where it gave birth to a novel, combinatorial branch." See R. V. Ambartzumian, «Combinatorial Integral Geometry», John Wiley, 1982.