Aleksandr Kotelnikov

Alexander Petrovich Kotelnikov (Russian Александр Петрович Котельников; born October 20, 1865 in Kazan, † March 6, 1944 in Moscow) was a Russian mathematician. He is considered a pioneer of vector analysis in Russia.

He was the son of Pyotr Ivanovich Kotelnikov (1809-1879), a professorial colleagues of Nikolai Lobachevsky in Kazan, was told by the that he was the only colleague who recognized the importance of Lobatschewskis work on non-Euclidean geometry during his lifetime.. Kotelnikov studied at the University of Kazan with the conclusion of 1884. Thereafter he taught at a secondary school in Kazan, but then went back to the University, where he taught from 1893 and received his doctorate in 1896. In his dissertation ( The calculation of the cross product and some of its applications in geometry and mechanics), he turned to methods of vector calculus in mechanics. In 1899 he completed his habilitation (Russian doctorate ) work with the projective theory of vectors. In it he generalized the vectors calculus with respect to applications in non-Euclidean geometry Lobatschewskis and Riemann. In 1899 he became Professor and Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics at the University of Kiev and in 1904 he had the same function in Kazan. In 1914 he went back to Kiev University as Head of theoretical mechanics and 1924 until his death he taught at the Bauman Polytechnic (later the Moscow State Technical University ), Moscow.

In 1934 he was Honoured Scientist of the Soviet Union and in 1943 he was awarded the Soviet State Prize.

He was editor of the Collected Works of Nikolai Lobachevsky and Jegorowitsch Zhukovsky.

In addition to the application of vector calculus in mechanics he also dealt with the application of quaternions and complex numbers in mechanics.

Writings

  • Introduction to Theoretical Mechanics ( in Russian), Moscow, Leningrad 1925
  • The principle of relativity and Lobaschewskis geometry ( Russian), Kazan 1927 ( in In Memoriam NI Lobachevsky, Volume 2 )
  • The theory of vectors and complex numbers (Russian) in some applications of Lobatscheskis geometry in mechanics and physics, Leningrad 1950
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