Alexander Adolfowitsch Witt

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Alexander Adolfowitsch Witt

Alexander Adolfowitsch Witt ( Russian Александр Адольфович Витт , scientific transliteration Aleksandr Adol'fovič Vitt ; born September 12, 1902 , † June 26, 1938 in the Kolyma area) was a Russian theoretical physicist.

Life

Witt was the son of a commercial clerk and attended high school in Moscow . From 1920 he studied at the Lomonosov University , while he also completed military service at the school for aerial surveying. After completing his military service, he became head of the statistical personnel registration office of the headquarters of the air fleet. He then worked from 1926 to 1929 with Leonid Mandelstam at Lomonossow, where he obtained his doctorate during this time. There he became one of the leading scientists in the field of non-linear vibrations with Alexander Alexandrowitsch Andronow . He also completed his habilitation with Mandelstam and became a professor at Lomonossow University. Andronows, Chaikins and Witt's monograph on it appeared in 1937, when Witt was arrested in the waves of Stalinist purges and sentenced on July 4, 1937 to five years in a camp. He died shortly afterwards in the camp in the Kolyma area (his last letter to his wife is from December 13, 1937).

Mandelstam, who suggested Witt for a stay abroad in 1929, particularly praised Witt's mathematical talent. For example, when a lecture on the Schrödinger equation threatened to be canceled in his seminar because the lecturer fell ill, Mandelstam assigned the task to Witt, which he solved off the cuff. Witt was also a pioneer in the field of chemical oscillation reactions (such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction ) long before they were studied in the context of chaos theory , as well as in the field of mathematical analysis of ecological systems and population dynamics (an area that was already explored at that time Vito Volterra and others was active).

He had been married to Olga Alexejewna Witt since 1935 and had a son, Alexander Witt. Witt's parents were of German origin and deported to Kazakhstan in 1941, where they died soon after.

In 1957 he was officially rehabilitated.

Fonts

  • AAAndronow, SEChaikin, AAWitt Theory of Vibrations , Akademie Verlag 1965 (the book first appeared in Russian in 1937 without mentioning Witt's name, which was only added in the second Russian edition in 1959)
  • with GFGause Behavior of mixed populations and the problem of natural selection , American Naturalist Vol. 69, 1935, pp. 596-609
  • with GF Gause, NP Smaragdova: Further studies of interaction between predators and prey , Journal of Animal Ecology, Vol. 5, 1936, pp. 1-18

literature

Gennady Gorelik My anti-Soviet activity .. Physicist under Stalin , Vieweg 1995 (especially p. 166ff, with letters from Witt to his wife from prison) ISBN 3-528-06584-2

Remarks

  1. Gorelik My anti-Soviet activity .. , p. 168

Web links