Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich (nationality - Russian) was a Soviet scientist in the field of mathematics and mechanics, academician and president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Played a key role in the Soviet space program.
Son of a talented father
Keldysh's father, Vsevolod Mikhailovich, was a military civil engineer who graduated from the Riga Polytechnic Institute. There he married Maria Alexandrovna Skvortsova, who devoted herself to raising children. Her father was an artillery general, from the nobility. Vsevolod Mikhailovich's father was a military doctor with the rank of general, also from the nobility. Keldysh was always proud of his noble origin, which created problems for him in a communist country. Due to the nature of Vsevolod Mikhailovich's work, the family traveled to different cities. He lectured at technical institutes and took part in the design and construction of the Moscow Metro and the Moscow-Volga Canal.
Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich: biography
Keldysh Mstislav was one of seven children. Their mother taught them German and French, and also instilled a love of music. His sister Lyudmila became a famous mathematician, and his brother Yuri became a musicologist.
KeldyshMstislav Vsevolodovich, whose family moved to Riga in 1909, where his father lectured at the Polytechnic Institute, was born on 1911-10-02. In 1915, the German army invaded Latvia and the staff of the Riga Polytechnic Institute was evacuated to Moscow. Here the family experienced hardships, living outside the city for several years, but the parents loved classical music and often attended concerts in the city. The children remembered one day in 1917 when their mother fed the whole family with fried onions, since there was no other food. By the end of 1918, the family moved to Ivanovo-Voznesensk, as his father began teaching at the institute, to which the Riga Polytechnic Institute was attached.
Study in Moscow
In 1923, the family moved to Moscow, and Mstislav, who was 12 years old, attended school number 7 in Krivoarbatsky Lane. The boy, who resembled a gypsy in appearance and behavior, was mischievous and grumpy.
Keldysh was proud of his noble origin, although it would be easier for him if he hid it. He always entered the entry "social origin - noble" in official forms, so in 1927 he was denied admission to the Institute of Civil Engineers.
The elder sister Lyudmila, contrary to the wishes of her father, who saw an engineer in his son, convinced him to study mathematics. Mstislav entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Moscow State University and graduated on July 24, 1931. On the strong recommendation of the teacher Keldysh Lavrentiev, the talented graduate was assigned to the Central Aerohydrodynamicinstitute.
Work at TsAGI
TsAGI created excellent conditions for research. Here Keldysh met Leonid Sedov, with whom he established close scientific cooperation and friendship, which influenced the further fate of the scientist.
In 1934–37 a series of articles on aerohydromechanics was published, the author of which was Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich. The growth of a talented scientist began with the solution of one of the aviation problems of the time - sudden strong vibrations that could destroy the aircraft. His theoretical work helped to overcome this problem. In addition, he did research for his doctoral dissertation on the use of series of polynomials to represent harmonic functions and a complex variable, which he defended in 1938
Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich: family and his children
In 1938, after a long courtship with a married woman, Keldysh married Stanislav Valeryanovna. The following year, his daughter was born, and in 1941, his son Peter. The son graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, and the daughter subsequently worked at the Keldysh Museum.
Talented mathematician
Keldysh continued his research and often collaborated with his former teacher Mikhail Lavrentiev. One of the topics he was then interested in was the Dirichlet problem.
Mstislav Keldysh was a talented mathematician and in the theory of differential equations. He made a particularly fundamental contribution to appliedbranches of aerodynamics. He was the government's chief theoretical adviser and organizer of jet propulsion and space computing in the 1940s and 1960s.
The problem of aircraft vibration was just one of the first problems he worked on. The second problem associated with it was the shaking that often occurred in the front landing gear of the aircraft upon landing. Here the experience gained in solving the vibration problem came in handy, and his solution to the shimmy problem, along with detailed instructions for engineers on how to fix it, was described in a 1945 paper. While working at Zhukovsky TsAGI, he did not leave the Mathematical Institute, heading the Department of Mechanics from its foundation in April 1944 until 1953
Examples of the works of this period, which he undertook at the Steklov Institute: "On mean square approximations by polynomials of functions of a complex variable" (1945), "On the interpolation of entire functions" (1947). It is worth noting that although these works relate to abstract mathematics, Keldysh's interest in these problems arose due to ideas that arose while solving applied mathematical problems.
Space and nuclear weapons
After the Second World War, Mstislav Keldysh was increasingly involved in the management of the main research projects that were implemented in the USSR. In 1946, he left TsAGI to become head of the Jet Research Institute, a position he held for nine years.
He was vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1961-62 and its president in 1962-75. On thecelebrating his 60th birthday in 1971, he said that he regretted the end of scientific research and the focus on management and administration. Nevertheless, he played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear weapons, as well as the space research program. For example, he was one of three scientists who proposed the Soviet space satellite program in 1954, and in 1955 he became chairman of the commission set up to oversee the program. The first successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 marked the beginning of an intensive space research program, and Keldysh was involved in this through a number of different organizations, such as the Department of Applied Mathematics he headed.
Work at the Academy of Sciences
In 1959, the Interdepartmental Scientific and Technical Council was established, headed by Mstislav Keldysh.
The biography of the scientist is marked by his tenure as president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he managed to carry out serious reforms. In particular, the CPSU rejected genetics because it did not fit with its ideology, and instead supported the politically correct but anti-scientific theories of Trofim Lysenko. In 1964, when his colleague Nikolai Nuzhdin was proposed as a full member of the Academy, Andrei Sakharov, a fellow nuclear weapons scientist, spoke out against it. The candidacy was rejected, and Keldysh contributed to the creation of conditions for the development of science without political interference, which was extremely difficult in the political situation that existed in the USSR at that time.
B1975 Mstislav Keldysh resigned as president of the Academy for he alth reasons. It is suggested that this was partly due to overwork, partly due to the tension caused by the difficulty in defending scientific ideals in a situation where science was used as the main tool of political struggle. Keldysh died on 06/24/78 and was buried with honors in the necropolis near the Kremlin wall.
Government Awards
Keldysh has received many awards both in his own country and from foreign countries. He was awarded the State Prize (1942) and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1943) for his work on aircraft vibration. In 1946, he was awarded another State Prize for his work on shimmy.
In 1943 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and a full academician three years later. In 1956, he received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for solving defense problems and received the Lenin Prize the following year. In 1961, he again became a Hero of Socialist Labor, this time for his work on rockets and Vostok, the world's first manned spacecraft, carrying Yuri Gagarin. Six times he was awarded the Order of Lenin and several times with medals.
Global recognition
Keldysh was a member of many academies: Mongolian (1961), Polish (1962), Czech (1962), Romanian (1965), German (1966), Bulgarian (1966), Hungarian (1970) Academies of Sciences, American Academy Arts and Sciences (1966) and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal SocietyEdinburgh on 1 July 1968. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Warsaw.
Finally, he was elected to the Central Committee of the CPSU (1961) and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1962). In addition, a lunar crater and a minor planet discovered in 1973 were named after him.
