Mychajlo Kravchuk

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Mychajlo Pylypowytsch Kravchuk , (also in French Kravtchouk ; Ukrainian Михайло Пилипович Кравчук ; born November 21, 1892 in Chovizna in Volhynia in Western Ukraine ; † March 9, 1942 in Kolyma in Siberia ) was a Ukrainian mathematician, especially analysis and statistics.

Life

Kravchuk studied at the University of Kiev , where he graduated in 1914 and, after he had to spend the time of the First World War in Moscow because the university was evacuated, received his doctorate in 1917 with Dmitry Grawe in Kiev. Then he was a lecturer a. a. at the Polytechnic and Economics Institute in Kiev. During the civil war, when Kiev was temporarily occupied by the Poles, he ran a school in the countryside near Kiev. From 1923 to 1933 he was head of the commission for mathematical statistics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1924 he completed his habilitation with Grawe with a thesis on quadratic forms and linear transformations . In 1924 he was at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto as well as the one in Bologna in 1928, where he got many contacts a. a. to Jacques Hadamard , Richard Courant , David Hilbert and Francesco Tricomi . In 1929 he was accepted into the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He was a professor at the Kiev Polytechnic . From 1934 to 1938 he was at the Mathematical Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

In February 1938 he was arrested at the height of the Stalinist waves of purges (which at that time killed millions of people) and, as a (Ukrainian) “Bourgeois nationalist” and Polish spy, sentenced to twenty years of forced labor in Siberia in a half-hour trial (without a lawyer). His many foreign contacts, including his Ukrainian colleagues in what was then Poland, were probably his undoing. Kravchuk published a. a. in Ukrainian and gave lectures in it, which was followed with suspicion at the time. Apparently Kravchuk had also written a letter to Stalin , the contents of which are unknown. Kravchuk refused to testify against Ukrainian colleagues and friends, but eight leading Soviet mathematicians also refused to testify against Kravchuk.

Four years later Kravchuk, who had heart problems, died in the Kolyma camp, where inmates had to dig for gold under arctic conditions. His name has been removed from publications and books and his writings have been restricted in the libraries. In a letter to his wife from the Gulag , Kravchuk wrote that he had solved a problem that he had been working on for 20 years. The work is lost.

In 1956 he was partially rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. In 1992 he was re-admitted to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and a first international conference was held on his behalf in Ukraine.

One of his students was Sergei Pavlovich Korolev , who later became the scientific director of the USSR space program.

plant

Monument in Kiev

Kravchuk published around 180 papers. He was mainly concerned with differential equations and integral equations including approximate methods for their solution, about which he wrote a two-volume textbook, which was translated into English by the computer pioneer John Atanasoff in the late 1930s. He became known in 1929 with his work on generalized Hermitian polynomials (Kravchuk polynomials). He also dealt with permutation matrices (the Kravchuk matrices are also named after him) and moment methods in statistics. He also wrote a mathematical dictionary in the Ukrainian language.

literature

  • Gottwald, Ilgauds, Schlote: Lexicon of important mathematicians. 1990

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Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ According to Gottwald u. a. Lexicon of important mathematicians 1990, the biography of MacTutor (see web link) indicates September 27th
  2. ↑ diary of geochemist Vernadsky Volodymir
  3. ↑ There were special collections for banned authors everywhere.
  4. ↑ Atanasoff then tried in vain to contact Kravchuk in Ukraine.
personal data
SURNAME Kravchuk, Mychajlo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kravchuk, Mychajlo Pylypowytsch; Kravchuk, Michail Fillipowitsch (Russian transcription); Кравчук, Михайло Пилипович (Ukrainian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Ukrainian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Chovitsna
DATE OF DEATH March 9, 1942
Place of death Kolyma