Professor Mark Balk

1923 - 2018

1923 ~ 2018
Salt Lake City, Utah-Mark Balk was born January 28, 1923, in the small town of Polonnoye in Western Ukraine. In 1937 his father was taken by secret police and executed. (20 years later, Mark's father would be rehabilitated and all his accusations would be deemed absurd.) Till the end, Mark would go through his life bent under the load of his father's disappearance. Each year, Mark would quietly fast on the day when he lost his father. In 1940 Mark entered Kiev University. In 1941, he went to fight Nazi Germany. His mother died during the evacuation from the rapidly advancing Nazis. After the war he graduated from Moscow Teachers University and went to work in the Teachers University of Smolensk (a regional capital) Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. There he created a mathematics school of polyanalytic functions. 13 people received their Ph.D. degrees under his supervision and became prominent figures. (One became the president of Smolensk University, several others became heads of math departments in various universities.) Mark wrote 11 books that were published in the Soviet Union, Japan and Germany. These books concerned many different topics - from his research area to space flight and from interesting math for school children to textbooks for university students. Mark also published more than one hundred research papers. Throughout his life he taught mathematics to thousands of future teachers. In 1997, he emigrated to the United States. Mark was deeply devoted to his family. He will be remembered in the hearts of many people whose lives he touched, and his wisdom will be always missed.
Mark died on January 16, 2018, in his home in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is survived by his two sons, Valery (Helsinki, Finland) and Alexander (Salt Lake City, Utah) and two grandchildren, Olga and Jonathan. Funeral Services will be held 10:00 AM, January 23, 2018, at B'nai Israel, 1021 E 4th Ave, Salt Lake City, Utah.