Mstislav Keldysh

His grandfather, Mikhail Fomich Keldysh (1839–1920), was a military physician, who retired with the military rank of General.

Keldysh's grandmother, Natalia Keldysh (née Brusilova), was a cousin of general Aleksei Brusilov.

Keldysh's maternal grandfather, Alexander Nikolayevich Skvortsov, was a General of Infantry, and fought in the Caucasian War.

Keldysh's father, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh (1878–1965), was a civil engineer, Major General of the Engineering Service, and a full professor, teaching at the Kuybyshev Military Engineering Academy from 1918.

The strongest influence on Keldysh was his older sister, Lyudmila Keldysh (1904–1976), a mathematician and Keldysh's first teacher.

Among her children are Leonid Keldysh, director of Lebedev Physical Institute and Sergei Novikov, a mathematician.

Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh (Мстисла́в Все́володович Ке́лдыш; 10 February 1911 – 24 June 1978) was a Soviet mathematician who worked as an engineer in the Soviet space program.

Keldysh was born in 1911 in Riga.

When he was four the family evacuated to Moscow during the First World War.

In the first years of the Soviet Union he was refused entrance to an Institute of Civil Engineers because of his attachment to a noble family.

Later, he managed to enter and graduate from the Physics and Mathematics department of the Moscow State University.

He obtained employment at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) under Mikhail Lavrentyev and Sergey Chaplygin.

Working at TsAGI he explained the auto-oscillation effects of flutter (in-flight auto-induced oscillations and structural deformations), and shimmy (auto-oscillation in the nose-wheel of aircraft undercarriages while on the ground).

The effects were responsible for many aircraft catastrophes at the time.

In the 1930s Keldysh's uncle was sent to a labor camp on the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction site.

In 1935 Keldysh's mother was arrested but was released after a few weeks.

It was a part of the campaign of collecting gold from the population, but after Keldysh's father brought all the jewelry the family had, the unsatisfied NKVD officer returned "all this garbage" back.

Keldysh's brother Mikhail, a historian who specialized in Medieval Germany, was arrested in 1936 and executed in 1937 on suspicion of being a German spy.

In 1937 Keldysh became Doctor of Science with his dissertation entitled Complex Variable and Harmonic Functions Representation by Polynomial Series, and was appointed a Professor of Moscow State University.

In 1938 another of Keldysh's brothers, Alexander, was arrested as a French spy.

Alexander was spared because of the slight liberalization of the repressions during the transfer of the NKVD leadership from Nikolai Yezhov to Lavrentiy Beria, and was acquitted in the court.

During the 1940s Keldysh became the leader of a group of applied mathematicians involved in almost all large scientific projects of the Soviet Union.

Keldysh created the Calculation Bureau that carried most of the mathematical problems related to the development of nuclear weapons.

The bureau is also credited with design of the first Soviet computers.

In 1943 he became a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

In 1943 he also became a full member of the Academy and the Director of NII-1 (Research Institute number 1) of the Department of the Aviation Industry.

He also headed the Department of Applied Mechanics of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics.

He became a Distinguished Engineering Scientist of the Soviet Union (Заслуженный деятель науки и техники СССР) in 1944.

He was one of the authors of contemporary methods for calculating the strength of reinforced concrete, and a designer of the Moscow Canal and Moscow Metro projects.

Several members of the Keldysh family were victims of political repressions.

He was the academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1946), President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1961–1975), three-time Hero of Socialist Labour (1956, 1961, 1971), and fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1968).

He was one of the key figures behind the Soviet space program.

Among scientific circles of the USSR Keldysh was known by the epithet "the Chief Theoretician" in analogy with epithet "the Chief Designer" used for Sergei Korolev.

Keldysh was born to a professional family of Russian nobility.

He got his first Stalin Prize in 1946 for his works on aircraft auto-oscillations.

In 1947 he became a member of the Communist Party.

Keldysh's main efforts were devoted to jet propulsion and rockets including supersonic gas dynamics, heat and mass exchange, and heat shielding.

1959 saw successful testing of the Soviet first cruise missile Burya.

In 1966 this department became an independent organization as the Institute of Applied Mathematics.

After his death in 1978 it is named after him to become the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics.