Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich (Russian nationality) was a Soviet scientist in the field of mathematics and mechanics, an academician and president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He played a key role in the Soviet space program.
Son of a talented father
Keldysh's father Vsevolod Mikhailovich was a military civil engineer who graduated from the Riga Polytechnic Institute. There he married Maria Alexandrovna Skvortsova, who devoted herself to raising children. Her father was a general of artillery, from the nobles. Vsevolod Mikhailovich's father was a military doctor with the rank of general, also from the nobility. Keldysh was always proud of his noble birth, which created problems for him in a communist country. Due to the nature of the work of Vsevolod Mikhailovich, the family traveled to different cities. He lectured at technical institutes and took part in the design and construction of the Moscow Metro and the Moscow-Volga Canal.
Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich: biography
Keldysh Mstislav was one of seven children. Mother taught them German and French, and instilled a love of music. His sister Lyudmila became a famous mathematician, and his brother Yuri became a musicologist.
Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich, whose family moved to Riga in 1909, where his father lectured at the Polytechnic Institute, was born on 02/10/1911. In 1915, the German army invaded Latvia and the staff of the Riga Polytechnic Institute was evacuated to Moscow. Here the family experienced hardships, living for several years outside the city, but parents loved classical music and often attended concerts in the city. The children recalled one day in 1917 when their mother fed the whole family with fried onions, since there was no other food. By the end of 1918 the family moved to Ivanovo-Voznesensk, as my father began to teach at the institute, to which the Riga Polytechnic Institute was attached.
Studying in Moscow
In 1923 the family moved to Moscow, and Mstislav, who was 12 years old, attended school number 7 in Krivoarbatsky Lane. The boy, who looked like a gypsy in appearance and behavior, was mischievous and grumpy.
Keldysh was proud of his noble birth, although it would have been easier for him if he had hidden it. In official forms, he always entered the entry “social origin - noble”, so in 1927 he was denied admission to the Institute of Civil Engineers.
The elder sister Lyudmila, contrary to the wishes of her father, who saw the son of an engineer, convinced him to study mathematics. Mstislav entered the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and graduated on July 24, 1931. Following the urgent recommendation of the teacher Keldysh Lavrentyev, the talented graduate was assigned to the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute.
Work at TsAGI
TsAGI created excellent conditions for research. Here Keldysh met Leonid Sedov, with whom he made close scientific cooperation and friendship, which influenced the fate of the scientist.
In 1934–37 a series of articles on aerohydromechanics was published, the author of which was Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich. The growth of a talented scientist began with the solution of one of the problems of aviation of that time - sudden strong vibrations that could destroy the plane. His theoretical work helped to overcome this problem. In addition, he conducted research for his doctoral dissertation on the use of series of polynomials to represent harmonic functions and a complex variable, which he defended in 1938.
Keldysh Mstislav Vsevolodovich: family and his children
In 1938, after long courtship of a married woman, Keldysh married Stanislav Valeryanovna. The next year, his daughter was born, and in 1941 - son Peter. The son graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, and his daughter subsequently worked at the Keldysh Museum.
Talented mathematician
Keldysh continued his studies and often collaborated with his former teacher Mikhail Lavrentiev. One of the topics that he was then interested in was the Dirichlet problem.
Mstislav Keldysh was also a talented mathematician in the theory of differential equations. He made a particularly fundamental contribution to the applied branches of aerodynamics. He was the chief theoretician-adviser to the government and the organizer of computational work related to jet engines and space in the 1940-60s.
The problem of aircraft vibration was only one of the first tasks on which he worked. The second related problem was shaking, which often occurred in the front landing gear of the aircraft . Here, the experience gained in solving the vibration problem came in handy, and his solution to the shimmy problem, along with detailed instructions for engineers on how to fix it, was described in a 1945 work. While working at the Zhukovsky TsAGI, he did not leave the Institute of Mathematics, heading the Department of Mechanics from its inception in April 1944 until 1953.
Examples of works of this period that he undertook at the Steklov Institute: “On mean square approximations by polynomials of functions of a complex variable” (1945), “On the interpolation of entire functions” (1947). It is worth noting that, although these works relate to abstract mathematics, Keldysh's interest in these problems arose thanks to the ideas that arose in solving applied mathematical problems.
Space and nuclear weapons
After the Second World War, Mstislav Keldysh was more and more involved in the management of the main research projects that were being implemented in the USSR. In 1946, he left TsAGI to become the head of the Jet Research Institute and held this position for nine years.
He was vice president of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1961–62 and its president in 1962–75. At the celebration of his 60th birthday in 1971, he said that he regretted stopping research and focusing on management and administration. Nevertheless, he played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear weapons, as well as a space research program. For example, he was one of three scientists who proposed the Soviet space satellite program in 1954, and in 1955 he became chairman of a commission set up to oversee the program. The first successful launch of the satellite in 1957 marked the beginning of an intensive program of space research, and Keldysh was involved in this through a number of different organizations, such as the department of applied mathematics he headed.
Work at the Academy of Sciences
In 1959, an Interdepartmental Scientific and Technical Council was created, the head of which was appointed Mstislav Keldysh.
The biography of the scientist was noted by his tenure as president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he managed to carry out serious reforms. In particular, the CPSU rejected genetics because it did not correspond to its ideology, and instead supported the politically correct, but unscientific theories of Trofim Lysenko. In 1964, when his associate Nikolai Nuzhdin was proposed to be a full member of the Academy, Andrei Sakharov, a colleague of a nuclear weapons scientist, spoke out. The candidacy was rejected, and Keldysh helped create the conditions for the development of science without political interference, which was extremely difficult in the political situation that existed then in the USSR.
In 1975, due to health reasons, Mstislav Keldysh resigned as president of the Academy. It is believed that this was partly due to overwork, partly due to stress caused by difficulties in protecting scientific ideals in a situation where science was used as the main tool of political struggle. Keldysh died on 06/24/78 and was buried with honors in a necropolis near the Kremlin wall.
Government Awards
Keldysh received many awards both in his country and from foreign countries. He was awarded the State Prize (1942) and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1943) for his work on the vibration of airplanes. In 1946, he was awarded another State Prize for work on shimmy.
In 1943, he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences and full academician three years later. In 1956, he received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor for solving defense problems and the next year received the Lenin Prize. In 1961, he again became a Hero of Socialist Labor, this time for his work on rockets and the Vostok, the world's first manned spacecraft on board which was Yuri Gagarin. Six times he was awarded the Order of Lenin and several times with medals.
World recognition
Keldysh was a member of many academies: Mongolian (1961), Polish (1962), Czech (1962), Romanian (1965), German (1966), Bulgarian (1966), Hungarian (1970) Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1966 ) and was elected an honorary member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh on July 1, 1968. He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Warsaw.
Finally, he was elected to the Central Committee of the CPSU (1961) and deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1962). In addition, a lunar crater and a small planet, discovered in 1973, were named in his honor.