Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt

Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt, 1938

Otto Schmidt, 1938

Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt ( Russian Отто Юльевич Шмидт , scientific transliteration Otto Jul'evič Šmidt ; * September 18 ^July / September 30,  1891 ^greg. In Mogilev , Russian Empire ; † September 7, 1956 in Moscow ) was a Soviet politician, Mathematician , geophysicist and Arctic explorer .

Life

Schmidt was born in Mogiljow, which today belonged to Belarus and at that time to the Russian Empire . His father was a descendant of German settlers in Courland , his mother was Latvian . Schmidt studied at the University of Kiev from 1909 to 1913 with Dmitrij Grawe , where he worked as a private lecturer from 1916 .

In 1913 Schmidt married the doctor and psychoanalyst Vera Janizkaja, who from 1921–1925 headed the children's home laboratory as Wera Schmidt, which is well known beyond the national borders . Otto Schmidt is the father of the well-known Russian historian on the history of Russia from the 15th to 17th centuries , Sigurd Schmidt .

Schmidt was buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.

Political career

After the October Revolution he was in the government in the People's Commissariat for Supply (Russian: Narodny Komissariat Prodowolstwija ) from 1918 to 1920 , in 1921 and 1922 Schmidt was in the People's Commissariat for Finance (Russian: Narodny Komissariat Finansow ) for the development of a mathematical Model of money creation . In the Soviet Union he was one of the promoters of education as well as science and literature. He was active in the People's Commissariat for Education , in the Scientific Advisory Board of the Assembly of People's Commissars of the USSR and at the Communist University. From 1921 to 1924 he was director of the state publishing organization Gosisdat and from 1924 to 1941 he was editor-in-chief of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia .

Otto Schmidt was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and was a delegate in the first General Assembly of the Supreme Soviet .

Academic career

From 1923 to 1956 Schmidt taught as a professor at the Lomonossow University in Moscow and was director of the Arctic Institute from 1930 to 1932 . In 1935 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and was its vice-president from 1939 to 1942. At the academy he set up the Institute for Theoretical Geophysics and headed it as its first director from 1937 to 1949. He also founded the Moscow Algebra School, which he also headed for several years.

In the mid-1940s he presented a cosmogonic hypothesis about the formation of the earth and the other planets of the solar system, which he pursued with a group of Soviet scientists until his death.

In 1946 the Geophysical Institute was founded at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the direction of which was given to Otto Schmidt.

Polar research

In 1929 and 1930 he led the "Sedov Expeditions" (named after Georgi Sedow ) to Franz-Joseph-Land and Severnaya Zemlya , during which the first scientific research station was established on Franz-Josef-Land, some islands could be recorded for the first time and the northwestern ones Areas of the Kara Sea and the west coast of Severnaya Zemlya were explored. As a scientific expedition leader he succeeded in 1932 with the icebreaker Sibirjakow under Captain Vladimir Voronin (1890-1952) for the first time the passage of the Northeast Passage called in Russia "Northern Sea Route" in a navigation period within 223 days. From 1932 to 1939 he was head of the newly established Northern Sea Route of the USSR (Russian: Glawsewmorput , abbreviation for Glawnoe uprawlenie Severnogo Morskogo Puti ) and as such was responsible for all economic issues relating to the Northern Sea Route . In addition, he led the Cheliuskin expedition from 1933 to 1934 and was the organizer of the first Soviet research on a drifting ice floe with the North Pole-1 station from 1937 to 1938 .

mathematics

Schmidt dealt mainly with group theory , which he published in 1912, when he was still in Grawe's seminar (the founder of the Russian school of algebra ). In 1916 his textbook on group theory was published, which was followed by the second edition in 1933. It was the first textbook in which not only finite but also equally infinite groups were systematically treated and the first Russian textbook in which the theory of group characters was treated. Between the two editions of his book he benefited from contacts during a stay in Göttingen in 1927 with David Hilbert , Emmy Noether , and Issai Schur . Alexander Kurosch , Anatoli Malzew , and Sergei Tschernikow emerged from Schmidt's Moscow Algebra Seminar (from 1930) .

Psychoanalysis

In 1922 Schmidt and his wife were a founding member of the Russian Psychoanalytic Association (RPV). The RPV was a successor organization to the “Moscow Psychoanalytic Society”, which was founded in 1911 by Leonid Drosnés and Nikolai J. Osipow . Otto Schmidt took care of the translation of Freud's works into Russian. In 1923 Vera and Otto Schmidt met Sigmund Freud in Vienna. They talked about the development of psychoanalysis in Russia.

Honors

Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt on a Soviet postage stamp from 1966

• Otto Schmidt was awarded the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union for his services on June 27, 1937 and was awarded the Order of Lenin three times, as well as three other orders and numerous medals of honor.
• The Schmidt Island in the Kara Sea , a headland on the coast of the Chukchi Sea and the nearby settlement mys shmidta in the Autonomous District of the Chukchi and the Geophysical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences bear his name.
• The asteroid (2108) Otto Schmidt , discovered in 1948 by the Soviet astronomer Pelageja Schain , was named in his honor. Together with two namesakes, the Schmidt lunar crater is named after him. He is also the namesake of Shmidt Point , a headland in the Antarctic.
• The first Soviet research icebreaker , which started operating in 1979, was named Otto Schmidt .
• In the cities of Mahiljou, Lipetsk and Kiev , streets bear the name of this naturalist.
• In 1995, the RAN Institute for Earth Physics created the Otto Schmidt Prize, which is awarded for important basic research in the Arctic.
• The Otto Schmidt Laboratory for Polar and Marine Research, founded in 1999 at the Institute for Arctic and Antarctic Research (AARI) in St. Petersburg and at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, was named after him.

Fonts

• Otto Schmidt: About infinite groups with a finite chain In: Mathematische Zeitschrift 29, 1929 ( online version )

literature

• Aleksey E. Levin, Stephen G. Brush The Origin of the Solar System: Soviet Research 1925-1991 . AIP Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56396-281-0 (English)
• Brontman, LK On top of the world: the Soviet expedition to the North pole, 1937–1938 , New York, 1938 (English)
• McCannon, John. Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932-1939 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 (English)
• Otto Iul'evich Shmidt: Zhizn 'i deiatel'nost . Moscow: Nauka, 1959.
• Gottwald, Ilgauds, Schlote Lexicon of Important Mathematicians , Leipzig 1990

Web links

Commons : Otto Schmidt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Otto Juljewitsch Schmidt in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• NN: Academician Otto Yul'yevich Shmidt. In: Problems of Cosmogeny , Vol. 5 (1964), pp. 4-7 (obituary, English)
• Biography on the homepage of the Institute for Earth Physics of the RAN
• Short biography of Otto Schmidt on Reisen-kiew.com
• Otto Schmidt Laboratory for Polar and Marine Research

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Otto Yulievich Shmidt . In: Website of the Schmidt Institute for Geophysics (Russian) . Retrieved January 16, 2015.
2. ↑ See article by Vera Schmidt on www.psychoanalytikerinnen.de
3. ^ Eugenia Fischer, René Fischer, Hans-Heinrich Otto, Hans-Joachim Rothe (eds.): Sigmund Freud / Nikolaj J. Ossipow correspondence 1921–1929, Brandes & Apsel Frankfurt am Main 2009; on the establishment of the “Russian Psychoanalytic Association”, initially called the “Moscow Psychoanalytic Society”, p. 173.
4. ↑ Irina Manson: "Vera Fedorovna Schmidt" . In: Alain de Mijolla (Ed.): Dictionnaire international de la Psychoanalysis. Paris, Calmann-Lévy 2002, p. 1535 f.
5. ^ Lutz D. Schmadel: Dictionary of Minor Planet Names , 5th. Edition, Springer Verlag, New York 2003, p. P. 171, ISBN 3-540-00238-3 .