Anatoly Ivanovich Maltsev (also: Malcev, Mal'cev; Russian: Анато́лий Ива́нович Ма́льцев; 27 November N.S./14 November O.S. 1909, Moscow Governorate – 7 June 1967, Novosibirsk) was born in Misheronsky, near Moscow, and died in Novosibirsk, USSR. He was a mathematician noted for his work on the decidability of various algebraic groups. Malcev algebras (generalisations of Lie algebras) are named after him.
At school, Maltsev demonstrated an aptitude for mathematics, and when he left school in 1927, he went to Moscow State University to study Mathematics. While he was there, he started teaching in a secondary school in Moscow. After graduating in 1931, he continued his teaching career and in 1932 was appointed as an assistant at the Ivanovo Pedagogical Institute located in Ivanovo, near Moscow.
Whilst teaching at Ivanovo, Maltsev made frequent trips to Moscow to discuss his research with Kolmogorov. Maltsev's first publications were on logic and model theory. Kolmogorov soon invited him to join his graduate programme at Moscow University, and, maintaining his post at Ivanovo, Maltsev effectively became Kolmogorov's student.
In 1937, Maltsev published a paper on the immersion of a ring in a field. Two years later, he published a second paper where he gave necessary and sufficient conditions for a semigroup to be embeddable in a group.