Samson Kutateladze

Samson Semyonovich Kutateladze (Самсо́н Семёнович Кутатела́дзе; 31 July 1914 – 20 March 1986) was a Soviet heat physicist and hydrodynamist.

Kutateladze's parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, Aleksandra Vladimirovna, an obstetric nurse.

His father, Semyon Samsonovich, had been a nobleman; he was before the October Revolution a student at Petrograd University and then an army officer.

Following the divorce, Kutateladze and his mother lived for a few years in Georgia, returning in 1922 to Petrograd.

Hoping to supplement the family's low income, Kutateladze left school to find work on completing the eighth grade at Leningrad's Secondary School 193.

His first job was as a fitter apprentice at the Chimgaz plant; shortly afterwards he entered a technical school associated with the Leningrad Regional Heat Engineering Institute, now known as the Polzunov Boiler and Turbine Institute.

He was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp near Novosibirsk.

Kutateladze started his research without higher education and worked in the institute until 1958, rising to the position of full professor and head of a major department.

His career was interrupted only by the Great Patriotic War, when Kutateladze served as a marine on the Northern Front.

He was wounded in the first days of the Nazi offensive on Murmansk, and carried an irremovable German bullet in his right leg until his death.

In 1958 Kutateladze left his position at the Physical-Technical Department of the Polzunov Institute in 1958 to become Deputy Director of the Thermal Physics Institute in the newly convened Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

He was a major designer of the Institute of Thermal Physics and its Director from 1964 up to death.

In 1994 the institute was renamed, in honor of him, as the Kutateladze Institute of Thermophysics.

Kutateladze's son, Semën Samsonovich Kutateladze, is a distinguished Russian mathematician.

Samson Kutateladze is renowned for his hydrodynamic theory of the burnout crisis of film boiling and for his theory of relative limit laws of wall turbulence.

He propounded the latter in Siberia, together with his student Aleksandr Leontiev, who went on to become a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.