Aleksey Krylov | |
|---|---|
 Official portrait, 1914 | |
| Native name | Russian:Алексей Николаевич Крылов |
| Born | (1863-08-03)August 3, 1863O.S. (August 15, 1863N.S.) Alatyrskyuezd ofSimbirskGubernia,Russian Empire |
| Died | October 26, 1945(1945-10-26) (aged 82) Leningrad,USSR |
| Buried | Leningrad, USSR |
| Allegiance | Russian Empire USSR |
| Service | Imperial Russian Navy |
| Years of service | 1878–1917 |
| Rank | General of the fleet |
| Signature |  |
Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov (Russian:Алексе́й Никола́евич Крыло́в; August 15 [O.S. 3 August] 1863 – October 26, 1945) was a Russiannavalengineer,applied mathematician andmemoirist.
Aleksey Nikolayevich Krylov was born on August 3O.S., 1863 in Visyaga village near the town of Alatyr,Simbirsk Governorate, Russian Empire (today Krylovo,Chuvashia) to the family of a retired artillery officer. His father, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krylov (1830-1911), was the local landlord andvice-Marshal of Nobility, but had relatively liberal views and later led thezemskaya uprava (the Executive Board of theZemstvo self-government system) in Alatyr. His mother, née Sofya Viktorovna Lyapunova, was a member of the distinguished Lyapunov family (the mathematicianAleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov and musicianSergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov were his second cousins).
In 1878 Krylov entered the Naval College (rus. Морское училище) and graduated with distinction in 1884. There he did his first scientific work withIvan de Collong onDeviation of magneticcompasses. The theory of magnetic and gyro-compasses fascinated him for all of his life; later he published important works related to the dynamics of the magnetic compass and proposed thedromoscope, a device that would automatically calculate the deviation of a compass. He also was a pioneer of thegyrocompass, being the first to create a full theory of it.
After spending several years at the Main Hydrographic Administration and at a shipbuilding plant (French-Russian shipbuilding company), in 1888 he continued his study in theNaval Academy ofSaint Petersburg. He was a talented and promising student and after graduating ahead-of-schedule from the Academy in 1890, stayed on asmathematics andship-theory lecturer.
Fame came to him in the 1890s, when his pioneeringTheory of oscillating motions of the ship, significantly extendingWilliam Froude'srolling theory, became internationally known. This was the first comprehensive theoretical study in the field. In 1898 Krylov received a Gold Medal from the BritishRoyal Institution of Naval Architects, the first time the prize was awarded to a foreigner. He also created a theory of damping of ship rolling and pitching, and was the first to proposegyroscopic damping which now is the most common way of damping the roll.
After 1900 Krylov actively collaborated withStepan Makarov,admiral and maritime scientist, working on theship floodability problem. The results of this work soon became classic and are used worldwide today. Years later, Krylov wrote about the early ideas of Makarov to fight the heel of a sinking ship by flooding its undamaged compartments: "This appeared to be such a great nonsense [to the naval officials] that it took 35 years… to convince [them] that the ideas of the 22-year-old Makarov are of great practical value".
Krylov was well known for his sharp tongue and quick wits. His put downs to government and Duma officials were legendary. As a capable naval consultant, he claimed that his advice saved the government more than the cost of adreadnought.
In 1917 he became CEO of the Russian society for shipbuilding and trade (the ROPiT, Русское общество пароходостроительства и торговли). After theOctober Revolution he peacefully transferred the ROPiT merchant fleet to the Soviet government and continued to work for the Russian Navy. In 1921 he was sent toLondon to re-establish scientific contacts, working there as a representative of the Soviet government. In 1927 he returned to theSoviet Union.
Krylov wrote about 300 papers and books. They span a wide range of topics, includingshipbuilding,magnetism,artillery,mathematics,astronomy, andgeodesy. His floodability tables have been used worldwide. Of note are his works inhydrodynamics including theory of ships moving in shallow water (he was the first to explain and calculate the significant increase of hydrodynamic resistance in shallow water) and the theory ofsolitons. In 1904 he built the first machine in Russia forintegratingOrdinary differential equations.[1]
In 1931 he published a paper on what is now called theKrylov subspace andKrylov subspace methods.[2] The paper deals witheigenvalue problems, namely, with computation of thecharacteristic polynomial coefficients of a givenmatrix. Krylov was concerned with efficient computations and, as a computational scientist, he counts the work as a number of separate numerical multiplications, something not very typical for a 1931 mathematical paper. Krylov begins with a careful comparison of the existing methods that include the worst-case-scenario estimate of the computational work in theJacobi method. Later, he presents his own method which is superior to the known methods of that time and is still widely used.
Krylov also published the first Russian translation ofIsaac Newton'sPhilosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1915).
Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov died inLeningrad (i.e.Saint Petersburg) on October 26, 1945, shortly after the end ofWorld War II. He is buried in theVolkovo Cemetery, not far from the physiologistIvan Pavlov and the chemistDmitri Mendeleev. He was awarded theStalin Prize (1941), threeOrders of Lenin,Hero of Socialist Labor (1943), and was anacademician of theRussian Academy of Sciences (after 1916). The craterKrylov on theMoon is named after him, as are theKrylov Peninsula and theKrylov State Research Center (a shipbuilding research institute of which Krylov had been superintendent).
In one of his autobiographical papers, Krylov describes his activity as 'shipbuilding, i.e. application of Mathematics to various Maritime problems.'
Krylov married his second cousin Elisaveta Dmitrievna Dranitsyna. His daughter Anna married famous physicistPyotr Kapitsa, discoverer ofsuperfluidity andNobel Prize in Physics winner. Their children included geographerAndrey Kapitsa, (1931–2011), who discoveredLake Vostok, the largestsubglacial lake inAntarctica 4,000 meters below the continent'sice cap,[3] andSergey Kapitsa (1928–2012), physicist and demographer, host of the popular and long-running Russian scientific TV show,Evident, but Incredible.[4] Aleksey Krylov was very close to his son-in-law.
Victor Henri, a French-Russian physical chemist and physiologist, was Krylov's paternal half-brother and maternal first cousin.
In the U.S.S.R. the differential analyser originated with the work of A. M. Krylov, during the period 1904–11, who is reported to have built a machine with four integrators.
