Mikhail Ostrogradsky

Mikhail Ostrogradsky was a mathematician, mechanician and physicist of the Russian Empire, of Ukrainian Cossack ancestry, born in 1801 in a village in the Poltava Governorate. He studied under Timofei Osipovsky at Kharkov and never took his degree after Osipovsky was suspended on religious grounds, then studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France from 1822 to 1826. Returning in 1828 he settled in Saint Petersburg, was elected to the Academy of Sciences and became a professor at the main military engineering school. He worked mainly on the calculus of variations, the integration of algebraic functions, number theory, algebra, geometry and probability theory, and in applied mathematics and mathematical physics.