Leonid Ivanovich Sedov

Sedow (left) congratulates Francesc Almor (1957 in Barcelona)

Leonid Iwanowitsch Sedow ( Russian Леонид Иванович Седов , English transcription Sedov; born November 1, 1907 in Rostov-on-Don , † September 5, 1999 in Moscow ) was a Russian scientist for applied mathematics and mechanics .

Life

Sedov graduated from Lomonosov University in 1930 and was then a scientist at the Central Aero-Hydrodynamic Institute until 1947. At the same time he was from 1937 professor at the Lomonossow University. He received his doctorate in 1936 under Sergei Alexejewitsch Tschaplygin and Nikolai Jegorowitsch Schukowski and completed his habilitation (Russian doctorate) in 1938 under Michail Alexejewitsch Lavrentjew ( theory of plane-parallel flow in liquids ). From 1945 he was at the Steklow Institute .

Sedov is known for developing mathematical solutions in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics , for example for the propagation of shock waves and modeling the impact of bodies. He dealt with the aerodynamic problem of flow and forces on deformable wings and non-stationary flow problems around airplane wings. He became known for his mathematical modeling of explosions, which was carried out during the Second World War. He applied similarity transformations and investigated self-similar solutions, about which he published a book. In part, these studies ran parallel to those of Western scientists such as Geoffrey Ingram Taylor around the same time. He developed models of continuum mechanics taking into account electrodynamic and thermodynamic effects and formulated a variation principle for the derivation of equations of motion and boundary conditions in continuum mechanics.

He also played a leading role in the Soviet space program. For example, in 1955 he was a member of the Soviet Commission in Copenhagen that announced the launch of the Sputnik satellite . This was the first official announcement by the Soviet Union of the existence of its space program. In 1961 and 1962 he was President of the International Astronautical Federation . From 1965 he was head of the Hydro- and Aerodynamics Department of the Soviet Academy of Sciences .

In 1946 he became a corresponding and in 1953 full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1960 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1969 a member of the Leopoldina . Since 1967 he has been a corresponding and since 1978 external member ( associé étranger ) of the Académie des sciences in Paris. In 1952 he received the State Prize of the USSR and the Order of Lenin four times . In 1967 he became a hero of socialist labor . In 1974 he received the Lyapunov Gold Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was a Knight of the Legion of Honor .

Fonts

• Introduction to the mechanics of continuous media , Addison-Wesley 1965
• Foundations of the nonlinear mechanics of continua , Academic Press 1966
• Similarity and Dimensional Methods in Mechanics , London 1959, 10th edition CRC Press 1993 (an English translation was also published by MIR, Moscow 1982)
• Propagation of strong shock waves , Journal of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, Volume 10, 1946, pp. 241-250
• as editor Unsteady motions of compressible media with blast waves , American Mathematical Society 1967
• Editor with GA Liubimov, GG Chernyi Fluid Mechanics , New York 1990
• Course in continuum mechanics , 4 volumes, Wolters Noordhoff, Groningen 1971–1972
• Two-dimensional problems in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics , Interscience 1965
• Editor: Analytical mechanics, stability of motion, celestial ballistics , Jerusalem, Israel Program for Scientific Translations 1968

Web links

• Great Soviet encyclopedia
• photo
• Member entry of Leonid I. Sedov at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 27, 2017.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Leonid Iwanowitsch Sedow in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
2. ↑ Origins and the Dawn of the Space Age, NASA, Korolev and Freedom of Space
3. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter S. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 28, 2020 (French).