Eugene Dynkin was born on May 11, 1924 in Leningrad. He attended Moscow University, beginning at age 14 and graduating wih a PhD in 1948. After graduation, Dynkin worked as an assistant professor at the university, but was forced to leave in 1968 because of his family's political problems. Dynkin next worked at the Economic and Mathematics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He emigrated to the United States in 1976 and was appointed professor of mathematics at Cornell University.
Dynkin's early work was in the area of Lie groups, where he developed the famous diagrams, now known as Dynkin Diagrams in his honor. Since 1954, he has focused mainly in the areas of probability and stochastic processes. He has made fundamental contributions in Markov processes, branching processes, diffusion processes, Markov random fields, and the connections between these processes and other areas of mathematics and physics. Dynkin received the Steele Award from the American Mathematical Society in 1993 for his lifetime contributions.