Soviet science

[rod]

Controls



Lyapunov did his work on the stability of dynamical systems in the late 19th century, long before the Soviet Union even existed. He committed suicide in 1918, during the Russian Civil War.



In Soviet times, Pontryagin [1] made significant contributions to optimal control theory, and the maximum principle is named after him. He was blind, and did all the work in his head, which he then dictated to his infinitely patient mother.



Some Soviet control theorists would be Yakubovich and Popov, after whom the Kalman–Yakubovich–Popov lemma is named, Krasovsky [2], and Nikolai Gurevich Chetaev.



In optimal control, a popular joke is that the Soviets proved everything there was to prove, but kept the proofs under wraps, so that control theorists in the West merely rediscover what the Soviets discovered decades ago.



I heard that some of the claims in western optimal control books are actually wrong. There are some nasty special cases, but only the Russians seem to know about them.





Optimization



Kantorovich founded linear programming. Khachiyan spawned the ellipsoid algorithm for linear programming. Nemirovski and Nesterov pioneered semidefinite programming, but their most famous work was arguably after the collapse of the Soviet Union, so that probably does not count as Soviet science.

[rod]

[1] Lev Semenovich Pontryagin (1908-1988)



[2] Nikolai Nikolaevich Krasovskii (1924-2012)

[rod]

The Soviets were also pioneers in nonlinear chemical oscillators. The Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction has fascinated me for years.

[Nonius]

my whole view on Soviet Science and French Mathematics and British Bullshit ability to appear Posh is this:



1. Steve Jobs.

2. Jim Clarke.

3. Colonel Saunders.

4. a=a etc.

[finanzmaster]

I doubt that such a book exists but anyway, science was more or less the only way of self-realization.

There was no opportunity to run a [legal] business, art was ideologically under control and as to political career, well, virtually everybody (esp. from worker's family) can make it but for a critical mind it was so insincere that most of talented people avoided it.

[katastrofa]

The Red Plenty

[jslade]

Red Plenty, I picked up when I developed this interest and read a few chapters. Interesting, but pretty twee and lousy as literature.



I'd really just like a book that listed some of the weird technological stuff the Soviets worked on (I dunno, Ekranoplans), and how the technical direction differed from that in the West and why; ideological reasons, technical limitations, whatever. Seems inherently interesting, but I don't read vodka runes well enough to do primary research myself. When I run across mini endmills with neural net brains, I'd like to know what them crazy guys were thinking about; why they were led there. Was it just a reaction to Drexler nonsense? Were they thinking about something else? What were they planning on doing with these things?

[thoughtcrime]

I don't believe any single book is comprehensive (and the ones that attempt to be comprehensive are very spotty, say by Loren Graham), but if we narrow it down to mathematics, or specific sectors, then there are good surveys such as by Bill Gunston and authors that many people have heard of.



There are also some good internet sources. The poster "Ron Maimon" on the internet has good material on Soviet science in general. His non-political posts are worth reading in general, even though some of it is insane (e.g. cold fusion).



His post on Soviet physics:



"In physics, which is the only field I am qualified to judge, the USSR was arguably the best, and if not the best, it was a close second to the US, in any case it is a very tight race. If you ignore the 1960s, where you have Landau's school leading the research on He4 and Superconductivity (although the Americans had Feynman's theory and BCS theory, just to be fair), and just go to the 1970s and 1980s, the Russians were first with Gribov's Reggeon perturbation theory, Polyakov's conformal bootstrap, inflation theory, they had the remarkable Gribov domains, the Shifman Vainshtein Zakharov QCD sum rules, the BPZ revolution in critical phenomena, the Polyakov string, 2d gravity, incredible stuff. It is highly technical (so highly technical that it is not appreciated by non-specialists), and it wasn't flashy enough to get the attention of the Nobel committee, which was somewhat biased against the USSR, not by conspiracy, but just due to Sweden being a Western nation. Soviet science was rather insular due to travel restrictions and no-need for publicity by their scientists. But everyone who reads the technical literature of the 1960s-1980s knows that the USSR was the powerhouse, and you couldn't get by without JETP in your library. It's not just physics of course, they were strong in most technical and engineering fields, with the exception of biological engineering, where they were somewhat behind.



But the US folks were much better in computational stuff, like Renormalization group theory, and Western Europeans and Californians developed string theory, so it's not like the US was slacking off. Like the space race, it was a tight, tight race, that benefited all of humanity. Just the Russians, in my opinion, produced more sophisticated baroque work. Compare the BPZ paper (a masterpiece) with, say, great American papers like those of Edward Witten. They are both great, but the Russians are more "out there" and more technically dense, the ideas come from outer space and it's HARD stuff, I mean, hard for even specialists. It's a total judgement call, and I'm not going to argue this for too long, because it's silly, but there is no doubt that Russia had the strongest or at least second strongest physics in the world in the 1980s (it's gone downhill since the collapse).



Although the Russians were somewhat ahead of the US in analytical tools like dispersion relations and conformal theory, in parts of condensed matter physics, in analytical tools for high energy physics, the Americans were definitely ahead in computational physics, other parts of condensed matter physics like sophisticated materials science, and in string theory. You don't understand what a beautiful thing Soviet physics is, it is like the lost Greek science of the Hellenistic period. It's a pity it is gone, looking at it makes you cry."



"You can assert all you like, but the unequalled contributions of Russia to physics are mostly freely downloadable online today, and you just make yourself look foolish. There is no dispute that the best physics papers of the 1970s and 1980s are Russian, this is true just by citation counting (SVZ and BPZ are some of the heaviest cited papers of the era, along with the American Weinberg paper for the standard model). The Nobel committee is not my problem, they have been out of touch for decades. That's why the Dirac medal was established, and if you look at the Dirac medalists, the Russians are fairly recognized (and Europeans too, especially Italians, who are also regularly slighted by the Swedes)."





He also has a Quora post on Soviet physicists ( https://www.quora.com/Who-are-some-of-the-most-underrated-physicists/answer/Ron-Maimon ).





Optical computing, etc. can be read about from NIE reports on the FOIA website:



http://www.foia.cia.gov

http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000500647.pdf





There's this massive dual-language Russian/English "encyclopedia" called "Russia's Arms and Techologies", especially the volume on optoelectronics ( https://www.amazon.com/Russias-Arms-Technologies-Century-Encyclopedia/dp/593799020X ):



http://arsenalrus.ru/rus/company/facts/index.php



DJVU files are available on the net, but I forgot the links (I have them on my computer).





SPIE has a book on Soviet optical engineering ( https://books.google.com/books?id=e2VAJsXqPUwC ). Haven't completely read it yet.





If you read FAS.org, there are good articles there by William T. Lee of the CIA/DIA, and he was planning to write this huge treatise "How the Cold War was Lost and Won" but then he died of cancer. He says that Soviet stuff was mostly guided by an early lag in solid-state electronics (widening by the 1960s), and that sounds right. Their initial technology base was inferior, but later they compensated for it by going in a roundabout way. Soviets were ahead in semiconductor heterostructures and liquid phase epitaxy ( https://books.google.com/books?id=e5mM5INQK9IC ), and probably metal matrix composites. On the other hand they had a better "mathematical base", this is reflected in the way they (Keldysh, et al.) solved the flutter problem in WW2 better than others did. "Stealth" via RAM coating originated in Ufimslev's method for analyzing the radar cross section (see http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9202034018/lockheed-credits-soviet-theory-design-f-117 ). There is the well-known work on neural nets (say used in the "Buran" space shuttle for automatic landing and navigation). They also managed to hit a ballistic missile directly with a missile in the 1960s (the USA only did this in 2004).



As for the overall "direction" of Soviet mathematics, the single best book is by La Salle and Lefschetz ( books.google.com/books?id=wSsKAAAAMAAJ, which is a bit dated but does identify their "direction" -- not such a big emphasis on algebraic topology or algebraic geometry, but then Novikov and others changed this trend later on. A more recent one is "Mathematical Events of the XX Century" by V.I. Arnold ( books.google.com/books?id=ejb6kQAACAAJ ). For books on Soviet math as applied to economic planning, there are the books by Zauberman especially "Mathematical Theory in Soviet Planning", "Aspects of Planometrics".



There's an interesting new book on the Soviet internet, including more information on Glushkov's contributions and OGAS (though unfortunately not about DISPLAN, which was exclusively used in the Soviet military industry):



https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Network-Nation-Information-ebook/dp/B01H138686/



The gist of it being that Soviets were more chaotic and decentralized, while the Americans were more centralized. (Funny; Alec Nove characterized the Soviet military industry as capitalist with the government being the sole consumer.) This is a common theme: the American infrastructure (with Bell Labs) was more centralized than the Soviet one, as revealed by RAND analyst R. W. Campbell in this book:



https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Post-soviet-Telecommunications-Industry-Reform/dp/0813325471/



There are interesting books on highly secretive Soviet projects. They include "The Universe Below" by William J. Broad (on deep sea submersibles and trawlers), "Cassidy's Run" by David Wise on chemical weapons and the super nerve gas, and "Stalking the Red Bear" by Sasgen. If I remember correctly, Soviets opened 66 "secret cities" or Naukograds after WW2, one of them was Akademgorodok:



https://www.amazon.com/New-Atlantis-Revisited-Paul-Josephson/dp/0691044546/



Some others were linked with the Soviet biological weapons program, and apart from Alibek's classic "Biohazard" ( https://www.amazon.com/Biohazard-Chilling-Largest-Biological-World-Told/dp/0375502319/ ) there is a recent study of this:



https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Biological-Weapons-Program-History/dp/0674047702/

[rod]

Ron Maimon is arguably one of the most interesting people alive today.



Unfortunately, he manages to find himself banned from every single forum he participates in.

[nikol]

If you want to cover everything in Soviet time you must start with Luzin (Лузин). His mathematical descendants count for thousands...



Genealogy Luzin



Wiki describes many stories about him and his top-10 students - incl. Kolmogorov, Pontrjagin, Aleksandrov, Keldysh, Novikov etc



His mathematical school was a unprecedented mathematicians making machine.