Mark Jakowlewitsch Wygodski

Mark Jakowlewitsch Wygodski , Russian Марк Яковлевич Выгодский (born October 2, 1898 in Minsk , † September 26, 1965 in Tula ) was a Russian mathematician.

Vygodski's father was a chemical engineer and his mother a music professor. He graduated from high school in Baku in 1916 and participated in the Russian civil war on the side of the Bolsheviks . He studied mathematics in Warsaw and after the evacuation of the university in Rostov-on-Don and at the Lomonossow University (as a student of Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt ).

He specialized in the history of mathematics and became a professor in 1931. With Sofja Alexandrovna Janowskaja he founded a Marxist direction in the history of mathematics . Vygodsky was then one of the most powerful people in Soviet mathematics, director of the Institute of Mathematics at Lomonosov University, vice-president of the Moscow Mathematical Society and head of the state publishing house for theoretical technical literature. He was a leader in campaigns against what he saw as reactionary professors such as Dmitri Fyodorowitsch Jegorow . In 1933 he founded a mathematical history seminar with Janowskaja in Moscow, which Adolf Pawlowitsch Juschkewitsch also joined (all three are considered to be the founders of the Soviet history of mathematics).

After the publication of a work on Galileo Galilei , which the Vatican praised, he fell temporarily out of favor and was expelled from the Communist Party in 1935. But he stayed at the university. In 1938 he completed his habilitation ("The Mathematics of the Ancient Babylonians"). After the Second World War he was again at the university from 1945 to 1948 and from 1950 also worked at the Polytechnic and Pedagogical Institute in Tula.

First he dealt with mathematics in antiquity and later with Babylonian mathematics, but also with the history of mathematics in Russia, with the history of analysis and differential geometry. He has also published translations of classical mathematical works ( Euklid , Johannes Kepler , Gaspard Monge , Leonhard Euler and others).

Fonts

• Plato as a Mathematician (Russian), 1926
• The number problem and its development (Russian), 1929
• The Problems of History and Marxist Methodology (Russian), 1930
• Arithmetic and Algebra in Antiquity (Russian)

literature

• Obituary by Adolf Juschkewitsch, Arch. Int. Hist. Sci., Vol. 19, 1966, pp. 271-272
• Vygodskii, Mark Yakovlevich, in: Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (Eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, p. 559