Nikolai Gur'yevich Chetayev (on the 100th anniversary of his birth)

✍ Scribed by V.V. Rumyantsev

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 715 KB
• Volume: 66
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0021-8928
• DOI: 10.1016/s0021-8928(02)00126-0

✦ Synopsis

NIKOLAI GUR'YEVICH CHETAYEV (on the 100th anniversary of his birth)t

V. V. RUMYANTSEV The 6 December 2002 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian scientist in the field of mechanics and teacher Nikolai Gur'yevich Chetayev, who made a huge contribution to the development of the theory of the stability of motion and analytical dynamics, was the founder and leader of the famous Kazan and then the world-renown Moscow School of General Mechanics, and was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Prikladnaya Matematika i Mekhanika from 1945 to 1959.

He was born in the village of Karaduli in the Laishevsk district of Kazan province into a sacristan's family, and received his secondary education at Kazan Third High School, renamed, after the revolution, the Second-Level School, which he left in 1919. He was an excellent pupil, and moved from class to class with commendable certificates of progress and good conduct; he was interested in natural sciences and the exact sciences. Having worked for a short time in a local government military registration and enlistment office, in 1920 he entered the Mathematics Section of the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Kazan University. He studied with inspiration, carrying along his peers, and he presided over the N. I. Lobachevskii study group. His industry and outstanding abilities drew him to the attention of the University professors. As a student, he entered into correspondence with Academician V. A. Steldov, on whose advice he began the in-depth study of the work of Lyapunov and Poincar6; he published his first scientific paper "Diffraction of light in opaque media".