Alexander Petrovich Kotelnikov

Alexander Petrovich Kotelnikow ( Russian Александр Петрович Котельников ; born October 20, 1865 in Kazan , † March 6, 1944 in Moscow ) was a Russian mathematician. He is considered to be the pioneer of vector calculation in Russia.

He was the son of Pyotr Ivanovich Kotelnikow (1809–1879), a professor colleague of Nikolai Lobachevsky in Kazan, of whom it was said that he was the only colleague who appreciated the importance of Lobachevsky's work on non-Euclidean geometry during his lifetime. Kotelnikow studied at the University of Kazan with the degree in 1884. He then taught in Kazan at a high school, but then went back to the university, where he taught from 1893 and received his doctorate in 1896. In his dissertation ( The calculus of the cross product and some of its applications in geometry and mechanics ) he applied vector calculation methods in mechanics . In 1899 he completed his habilitation (Russian doctorate) with the work The projective theory of vectors . In it he generalized the vector calculus with regard to applications in the non-Euclidean geometry of Lobachevsky and Riemann . In 1899 he became professor and head of the Faculty of Pure Mathematics at the University of Kiev and from 1904 he held the same position in Kazan. In 1914 he went back to the University of Kiev as head of the department of theoretical mechanics and in 1924 until his death he taught at the Bauman Polytechnic (later Moscow State Technical University ) in Moscow.

In 1934 he became an Honored Scientist of the Soviet Union and in 1943 he received the Soviet State Prize.

He was editor of the collected works of Lobachevsky and Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky .

In addition to the application of vector calculation in mechanics, he also dealt with the application of quaternions and complex numbers in mechanics.

Fonts

• Introduction to Theoretical Mechanics (Russian), Moscow, Leningrad 1925
• The principle of relativity and Lobaschewski's geometry (Russian), Kazan 1927 (in In Memoriam NI Lobatschewski , Volume 2)
• The theory of vectors and complex numbers (Russian) in Some Applications of Lobachesky's Geometry in Mechanics and Physics , Leningrad 1950

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Alexander Petrowitsch Kotelnikow. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Biography of AT Grigorian in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Grigorian in the article Kotelnikov, Dictionary of Scientific Biography