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Person: Keldysh (2), Mstislav Vsevolodovich

Mstislav Keldysh was a Latvian-born Soviet mathematician and engineer who did important work on aerohydrodynamics. He also worked on functions of a complex variable and differential equations.

Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):

• Mstislav Vsevolodovich was always proud of his noble roots even though this gave him problems in Communist Russia.
• Mstislav Keldysh was proud of his noble origins even through he might have had an easier time if he had hidden them.
• Keldysh worked on aerohydrodynamics, publishing a series of papers on the topic between 1934 and 1937.
• Keldysh's theoretical work on this was a highly significant factor in overcoming the problem.
• But this was not the only research that Keldysh was undertaking at the time, for Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov invited him to undertake research for a doctorate at the V A Steklov Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences after the Institute had moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1934.
• Keldysh's research seminars soon came to assume a prominent role in the mathematical life of Moscow and influenced the development of many young mathematicians, both pure and applied, now distinguished research workers.
• Keldysh continued his research, often collaborating with his former teacher, Mikhail Lavrent'ev.
• For example Keldysh published: Conformal mappings of multiply connected domains on canonical domains (1939), a survey of recent developments; (with Lavrent'ev) Sur une évaluation pour la fonction de Green (1939); (with Lavrent'ev) Sur un problème de M Carleman (1939); and the single-authored paper Sur l'approximation en moyenne quadratique des fonctions analytiques (1939).
• One of the topics that most interested Keldysh around this time was the Dirichlet problem.
• As an example of his work in this area we quote from a review of Keldysh's paper On the solubility and the stability of Dirichlet's problem (Russian) (1941).
• M Keldysh was the President of the Academy of Sciences of USSR for a long time.
• Let us look in a little more detail at some of these aspects of Keldysh's career.
• The first successful satellite launch in 1957 marked the beginning of an intensive programme of space research and Keldysh was involved in this through a number of different organisations such as the Department of Applied Mathematics which he headed.
• In 1959 the Interdepartmental Scientific and Engineering Council was established and Keldysh was appointed head of the Council.
• Matters came to a head in 1964, during Keldysh's presidency, when Nikolai Nuzhdin, an associate of Lysenko, was proposed for full membership of the Academy.
• It was for health reasons that Keldysh stepped down as president of the Academy in 1975.
• Keldysh received many honours both from his own country and from foreign countries.

Born 10 February 1911, Riga, Latvia. Died 24 June 1978, Moscow, Russia.

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References

Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:

1. O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive