Mstislav Vsevolodowitsch Keldysch

Keldysh Monument in Moscow

Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh ( Russian Мстислав Всеволодович Келдыш , scientific. Transliteration Mstislav Vsevolodovič Keldyš ; January 28 ^jul. / 10. February  1911 ^greg. In Riga , Russian Empire ; † 24. June 1978 in Moscow , USSR ) was a Soviet mathematician , who held a leading position in research in the former USSR both through his scientific contributions to aerodynamics and space travel and as an organizer.

Life

Keldysch came from a noble Russian family . Both his maternal grandfather A. N. Skworzow and his paternal M. F. Keldysch were generals in the Russian army . His father Vsevolod Keldysh (1878-1965) was a famous Russian designer and mechanic. Mstislav Keldysch had a brother and a sister. His brother Yuri Keldysch was a music theorist and historian in Saint Petersburg , while his sister Lyudmila Keldysch was a mathematician. In 1931, Keldysch completed his studies of mathematics and physics at Moscow's Lomonosov University and, on the recommendation of his teacher Mikhail Lavrentiev, entered the Central Institute for Aerodynamics and Hydrodynamics , where Sergei Chaplygin worked alongside Lavrentiev (proven for modeling aerodynamic flows conformal mapping methods prove useful). Here Keldysch contributed significantly to the solution of the then acute problem of wing flutter that occurred in airplanes , for which he received his first state award in 1942 , then still called the Stalin Prize . In addition, he obtained his doctorate in mathematics with a thesis on function theory at the Steklow Institute in 1938 at the invitation of his director Ivan Winogradov . In 1946 he received his second state award for solving oscillation problems on aircraft front wheels. From 1944 to 1953 he headed the Institute for Mechanics of the Academy of Sciences and then the Institute for Applied Mathematics (IAM) of the Academy, which was founded specifically to cope with the extensive numerical calculations in connection with the atomic bomb development organized by Keldysch (development by Algorithms etc.). After the end of the war, in his old mechanical field, he devoted himself to the problems that arose from supersonic flights and in connection with the incipient rocket and space program . In 1954 he wrote a letter to the government with Sergei Korolev and Vladimir Tichomirow , which recommended the start of a satellite program. In 1955, Keldysch became chairman of a committee formed for this purpose at the Academy of Sciences (which became an official committee of the Academy in 1959) and developed optimized ballistic trajectories to shoot satellites into space. From 1961 to 1975 he was chairman of the Academy of Sciences. One day before their 250th anniversary, the always conscientious and hardworking Keldysch resigned for health reasons.

After his nephew, SP Novikov , he enjoyed a high reputation in the Soviet Union, but was deeply affected in the early 1960s when he learned from his nephew Leonid Keldysh, who had visited the USA, that his name was virtually unknown in the USA. According to Novikov, this was also a result of the secrecy he himself pursued in the Soviet Union, hiding the names of the really successful scientists in the military-industrial complex from abroad and even spreading fictional stories about them.

Honors

After Keldysh's death, his urn was buried on the Kremlin wall on Red Square in Moscow . A place in Moscow, a research ship " Akademik Mstislaw Keldysch " (known as the mother ship for diving trips to the wreck of the Titanic from the 1990s), the asteroid (2186) Keldysh and the lunar crater Keldysh as well as his former institute were named after him.

Keldysch received the Stalin Prize in 1942 and 1946 , was named Hero of Socialist Labor in 1956, 1961 and 1971 , was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet and a six-time holder of the Order of Lenin . In 1957 he received the Lenin Prize , in 1969 the Order of Bernardo O'Higgins and in 1975 the Lomonosov gold medal . In 1965 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina , in 1966 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1968 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

The Institute for Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAM RAS) - previously the Applied Mathematics Department at the Steklov Institute - is named after him. The same applies to the Mstislaw-Keldysch glacier bay in the Antarctic.

literature

• Mstislav V. Keldysch, Renate Helle: Repetition of elementary function theory. VEB Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1959

Individual evidence

1. ^ S. Novikov, The Second Half of the 20th Century and its Conclusion: Crisis in the Physics and Mathematics Community in Russia and in the West, in: AMS Translations, Volume 212, 2004, pdf
2. ^ Biography of Mstislaw Keldysch. Retrieved July 8, 2020 (Russian). 

Web links

• Literature by and about Mstislaw Wsewolodowitsch Keldysch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Biography