Samson Kutateladze

Samson Kutateladze
Born July 18, 1914
St. Petersburg, Imperial Russia
Died March 20, 1986 (aged 71)
Moscow, USSR
Nationality USSR
Fields Physics and energetics
Institutions Polzunov Institute, Krylov Navy Academy, Novosibirsk State University, Kutateladze Institute of Thermophysics of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Doctoral students Vladimir Nakoryakov
Aleksandr Leont'ev
A.K. Rebrov, Eh.P. Volchkov
Known for Burnout and near-wall turbulence
Notable awards Max Jakob Memorial Award (1969)
Polzunov Award (1976)
USSR State Prize (1983)
Russian Federation State Prize (1988)

Samson Semenovich Kutateladze (Russian: Самсо́н Семёнович Кутатела́дзе) (July 18, 1914– March 20, 1986) was a Soviet heat physicist and hydrodynamist.

Biography

Early life

Kutateladze's parents divorced when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, Aleksandra Vladimirovna, an obstetric nurse. His father, Semen Samsonovich, had been a nobleman; he was before the Great October Revolution a student at Petrograd University and then an army officer. He was arrested in 1937 and died in a camp near Novosibirsk. Following the divorce, Kutateladze and his mother lived for a few years in Georgia, returning in 1922 to Petrograd.

Maturity

Hoping to supplement the family's low income, Kutateladze left school to find work on completing the eighth grade at Leningrad's Secondary School 193. His first job was as a fitter apprentice at the Chimgaz plant; shortly afterwards he entered a technical school associated with the Leningrad Regional Heat Engineering Institute, now known as the Polzunov Boiler and Turbine Institute. Kutateladze started his research without higher education and worked in the institute until 1958, rising to the position of full professor and head of a major department. His career was interrupted only by the Great Patriotic War, when Kutateladze served as a marine on the Northern Front. He was wounded in the first days of the Nazi offensive on Murmansk, and carried an unextractable German bullet in his right leg until his death.

In 1958 Kutateladze left his position at the Physical-Technical Department of the Polzunov Institute in 1958 to become Deputy Director of the Thermal Physics Institute in the newly-convened Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He was a major designer of the Institute of Thermal Physics and its Director from 1964 up to death. In 1994 the institute was renamed, in honor of him, as the Kutateladze Institute of Thermophysics.[1] Kutateladze's son, Semen Samsonovich Kutateladze, is a distinguished Russian mathematician.

Scientific heritage

Samson Kutateladze is renowned for his hydrodynamic theory of the burnout crisis of film boiling and for his theory of relative limit laws of wall turbulence. He propounded the latter in Siberia, together with his student Aleksandr Leontiev, who went on to become a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Awards and honors

Major publications

  1. ↑ Information about Kutateladze`s contribution in Russian

External links