Mikhail Lavrentyev

Mikhail Alekseyevich Lavrentyev (1900 to 1980), also transliterated Lavrentiev, was a Soviet mathematician and hydrodynamicist. Born in Kazan, he moved with his family to Moscow in 1921, graduated from Moscow University in 1922 and was a graduate student of Nikolai Luzin from 1923 to 1926. His main contributions concern conformal mappings and partial differential equations, and his student Mstislav Keldysh worked with him on their applications. In 1939 he was asked to direct the Institute of Mathematics in Kyiv, and during the Second World War he worked on the physics of explosive processes, later put to use in controlled blasting for construction, the best known example being the Medeu mudflow control dam near Almaty. From 1957 to 1975 he was a principal organizer and the first chairman of the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and the founding of Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk is his most widely known achievement. He also founded the Institute of Hydrodynamics in Novosibirsk, which has carried his name since 1980, and he was named Hero of Socialist Labour and received a Lenin Prize, two Stalin Prizes and the Lomonosov Gold Medal.