Alexei Krylov

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Alexey Krylov
Alexey Krylov in the 1910s
Born	August 3, 1863 O.S. (August 15, 1863 N.S.) Simbirsk Gubernia, Russia
Died	October 26, 1945 Saint Petersburg, Russia

Alexei Nikolaevich Krylov (Russian: Алексей Николаевич Крылов) (August 15, 1863 N.S. - October 26, 1945) was a Russian Naval engineer, applied mathematician and memoirist.

[edit] Biography

Alexei Nikolaevich Krylov was born on August 3 O.S., 1863 to a family of an Army Artillery officer in a village of the Simbirsk Gubernia in Russia. The family was poor but Alexei could get a free education as a son of army veteran.

Krylov entered a Naval College({Морское училище) in 1878 and finished it with distinction in 1884. There he did his first scientific work with Ivan de Collong about Deviation of magnetic compasses. The theory of magnetic and gyro-compasses fascinated him all his life; he later published important works related to the dynamics of the magnetic compass and proposed the dromoscope, a device that automatically calculates deviation of compasses. He also was one of the pioneers of the gyrocompass, being the first who created the full theory of it.

After spending several years at the Main Hydrographic Administration and at a shipbuilding plant (French-Russian shipbuilding company), in 1888 he continued his study in the Naval Academy in Saint Petersburg. He was a talented and promising student and after ahead-of-schedule graduation from the Academy in 1890 he could stay there as Mathematics and Ship-theory lecturer.

The fame came to him in the 1890s, when his pioneering Theory of oscillating motions of the ship, significantly extending William Froude's rolling theory, became internationally known. This was the first comprehensive theoretical study in the field. In 1898 Krylov received a Gold Medal from the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (it was the first time the prize was awarded to a foreigner). He also created a theory of damping of ship rolling and pitching. He was first proposed gyroscopic damping of the roll that now is the most common way of damping the roll.

Alexei Krylov with daughter Anna, later Anna Kapitsa, wife of Pyotr Kapitsa 1904

After 1900 Krylov actively collaborated with Stepan Makarov, admiral and maritime scientist, working on the ship floodability problem. The results of this work soon became classic, they are widely used nowadays over the world. Many years later, Krylov wrote about one of the early ideas of Makarov to fight the heel of a sinking ship by flooding its undamaged compartments: This appeared to be such a great nonsense [to the naval officials] that it took 35 years ...to convince [them] that the ideas of the 22-years-old Makarov are of great practical value.

Krylov was famous for his sharp tongue and quick wits. His put downs to government and Duma officials were legendary. He also was a very capable Naval consultant. He claimed that his advises saved the government more than a cost of a dreadnaught.

In 1917 he was a CEO of Russian society for shipbuilding and trade (Русское общество параходостроительства и торговли). After October Revolution he transferred all his ships to Soviet government and continued to work for Russian Navy. In 1921 he went to London to re-establish scientific contacts between Soviets and abroad. He works there as a representative of Soviet government. In 1927 he returned to Soviet Union.

Krylov is famous for his works in hydrodynamics including theory of ship moving in shallow water (he was the first to explain and calculate the significant increase of hydrodynamic resistance in shallow water) and the theory of solitons.

Krylov wrote about 300 papers and books. They span a wide range of topics, including shipbuilding, magnetism, artillery, mathematics, astronomy, and geodesy. His floodability tables have been used worldwide. In 1904 he built the first machine in Russia for integrating ODEs.

Krylov in 30-ies

In 1931 he published a paper on what is now called the Krylov subspace and Krylov subspace methods. The paper deals with eigenvalue problems, namely, with computation of the characteristic polynomial coefficients of a given matrix. Krylov is concerned with efficient computations and, as a real computational scientist, he counts the work as number of separate numerical multiplications--something not very typical for a 1931 mathematical paper. Krylov begins with a careful comparison of the existing methods that includes the worst-case-scenario estimate of the computational work in the Jacobi method. After that, he presents his own method which is superior to the known methods of that time and is still widely used.

Krylov published the first Russian translation of Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1915).

Alexei Nikolaevich Krylov died in Saint Petersburg (by that time Leningrad) on October 26, 1945, shortly after the end of the World War II. He is buried on the Belkovo cemetery, not far from the physiologist Ivan Pavlov and the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev.

Alexei Krylov was awarded the USSR State Prize (1941) and three Orders of Lenin. He was an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 1916), Hero of Socialist Labor (1943). A crater on the Moon is named after him.

...In one of his autobiographical papers, Krylov describes his activity as shipbuilding, i.e. application of Mathematics to various Maritime problems...

[edit] Family

Krylov married his second cousin Elisaveta Dmitrievna Dranitsyna. His daughter Anna married famous physicist Pyotr Kapitsa. Alexei Krylov was very close to his son-in-law.