Mstislav Keldysh

Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh (1911 to 1978) was a Soviet mathematician who worked as an engineer in the Soviet space program. Born in Riga, he grew up in Moscow, graduated from the physics and mathematics department of Moscow State University and in 1937 became a Doctor of Science with a dissertation on the representation of complex variable and harmonic functions by polynomial series, after which he was appointed professor at Moscow State University. He became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1943 and received Stalin Prizes in 1942 and 1946. During the 1940s he led a group of applied mathematicians on large Soviet projects and created the Calculation Bureau that handled mathematical problems of nuclear weapons development and is credited with the design of the first Soviet computers. In 1954 he, Sergei Korolev and Mikhail Tikhonravov proposed an artificial satellite. He was President of the Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 1975, and he was the uncle of the mathematician Sergei Novikov.