Victor Shestakov

Victor Ivanovich Shestakov (1907 to 1987) was a Russian and Soviet logician and theoretician of electrical engineering. In 1935 he found that Boolean algebra of logic can be interpreted in electro-mechanical relay circuits. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1934 and worked in its General Physics Department until almost the end of his life. Shestakov proposed a theory of electric switches based on Boolean logic earlier than Claude Shannon, a priority attested by Soviet logicians and mathematicians including Sofya Yanovskaya, Roland Dobrushin and Oleg Lupanov. Both men defended their theses in 1938, but Shestakov first published his result only in 1941, in Russian. He built an algebraic model of two-pole switches, later extended to three- and four-pole switches, in which element resistances take real values and which reduces to the two-valued Boolean algebra on the set containing zero and infinity. He may be considered a forerunner of combinatorial logic and of its use in electrical engineering.