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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Zhukovsky Nikolay Egorovich. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Nikolai Egorovich Zhukovsky was born on January 5 (17), 1847. He was the son of an engineer, one of the builders of the Nizhny Novgorod railway. The boy grew up in an old, but not at all rich, noble house. Here everything was done in the French way, the most important thing was that the children had good manners, good tone. First, the boy was sent to the Fourth Moscow Gymnasium. Mathematics in this gymnasium was taught by the authors of the most common textbooks in Russia - Malinin and Burenin. In the first grades, Zhukovsky turned out to be the worst mathematician because of his absent-mindedness. Zhukovsky did not like figures and calculations in their naked, abstract form, and he studied poorly with Malinin. But Burenin, who taught geometry, suddenly turned out to be the best student. Obviously, by the very turn of his mind, the child could most clearly see the world and understand the relationships in it geometrically, when the understanding was extremely clear, visible. After graduating from the gymnasium with a gold medal, Zhukovsky entered the mathematical faculty of Moscow University. Famous scientists lectured at the university: Davidov, Sludsky, Zinger. Already from the first year of his stay at the university, Zhukovsky participated, together with his teachers, in the classes of a mathematical circle, from which the Moscow Mathematical Society later grew. The student Zhukovsky lived in a room called by his comrades a "locker" and, when combing his hair, touched the ceiling with a comb. He ran around the city, giving lessons to various students, published lectures in a lithographic way, carefully recorded by him and having great success in his edition. In 1868 the university course was completed. Zhukovsky was drawn to practical activities. He then dreamed of becoming an engineer, like his friend Shchukin, later a well-known builder of steam locomotives. Friends entered the St. Petersburg Institute of Communications together, but here the professors were not engaged in explaining the guiding scientific ideas, but in a simple presentation of the factual material needed for everyday practice, taught students to count and draw. And Zhukovsky just didn’t have any special abilities or desire for this. As a result, a year later, he failed the surveying exam and decided that he would not be an engineer. Then he left the institute and returned to Moscow. Due to a morbid condition, he had to spend a whole year with his father in Orekhovo, and in the autumn of 1870 he became a physics teacher in one of the Moscow women's gymnasiums. Soon he was assigned to teach mathematics at the Moscow Higher Technical School, from which he did not leave until the end of his life. The young scientist, cut off from the university, had a hard time with his master's thesis "Kinematics of a Liquid Body", but he defended it brilliantly; this work was his first contribution to hydrodynamics. Before him, no one was engaged in kinematics, that is, the visual-geometric side of the movement of fluid particles. What happens in a moving fluid was known only in general terms. But to imagine, perhaps even to draw a specific path of motion of some particle, which is acted upon by countless forces, this task seemed impossible. Zhukovsky found a formula that allowed him to calculate the behavior of each particle in a moving fluid stream. The school council sent the young master abroad. He listened to the famous Helmholtz, Kirchhoff in Berlin, worked with Darboux and Reval at the Sorbonne, became close in Paris with the most prominent Russian scientists of that time: Andreev, Yablochkov, Liventsev. At this time, Zhukovsky began to study the movement of air currents. Later, he created a new science, which was called aerodynamics. Zhukovsky returned to Moscow with firmly established views both on science and on himself. He was elected a professor in the department of mechanics by the Council of the Higher Technical School. The essay "On the strength of motion" brought him the degree of Doctor of Applied Mechanics. In 1888, Zhukovsky took the chair of applied mechanics at the university. He becomes an active member of all scientific societies in Moscow, where he has already settled down with his mother, brothers and sisters. At his desk in his Moscow apartment, Zhukovsky, with geometric expressiveness and mathematical precision, formulated the laws governing the movement of water and air. With the help of drawings, formulas and numbers, he introduced people who could read them into a huge laboratory of living nature. Once Nikolai Yegorovich dealt with the issue of the rotation of the spindle on the annular waters. After a theoretical solution, he proposed, as always, a practical design of the spindle. Friends warned him that, under Russian law, an inventor would be deprived of the right to a patent if an application for an invention was preceded by a public report about it. Zhukovsky did not cancel the report. For a hundred years, theoreticians and experimenters have been striving to create the optimal form of a ship's propeller. The steam turbine had already been invented and high-speed ships were being built. Finding the best shape for such a propeller was now an urgent task. Engineering genius Englishman Parsons, the inventor of the steam turbine, struggled with a practical solution. European scientists theorized. Zhukovsky, undertaking the same thing, created his famous "Vortex Theory of the Propeller" and put an end to the controversy. The students and comrades, who knew the severity of the situation, insisted on the immediate printing of the work. Zhukovsky did not agree to haste. - You will lose the scientific championship, Nikolai Yegorovich! - convinced him. "It doesn't matter," Zhukovsky replied calmly. It was important for him to solve the problem in the most profound and correct way - everything else, like the pursuit of "primacy", interfered, distracting attention and mind. In 1903, the Americans, the Wright brothers, first flew an airplane. But it was Zhukovsky who became the real creator of both scientific and practical aviation. Among other works, the great scientist paid much attention to the problem of aviation. By the end of his long life, his aviation was already Zhukovsky's main business. Back in 1892, a Russian scientist in a modest article "On soaring birds" explained how birds can soar in the air with outstretched wings, and theoretically proved that it is possible to build devices for artificial soaring, that they will be stable and even be able to make dead loops and aerobatic figures. In 1897, Zhukovsky's article "On the most favorable angle of inclination of airplanes" appears. In 1902, Zhukovsky built a wind tunnel at Moscow University. He placed models in it, a powerful fan drove air towards them. In 1904, on the basis of his laboratory, the world's first institute of aerodynamic research was established. It is located in the suburban village of Kuchino. It was there that Zhukovsky made his main discovery - he found the source of wing lift and gave a formula for calculating this force. So the mathematical calculation of any aircraft became possible. Until now, all over the world, the course of aerodynamics is being read with a presentation of the theory of lift developed by Zhukovsky. Based on his discoveries, the scientist also developed the theory of the aircraft wing, methods for calculating propellers and flight dynamics. In 1910, Zhukovsky created an aerodynamic laboratory at the Moscow Higher Technical School. In it, Zhukovsky was engaged in the study of propellers. In this laboratory, Zhukovsky's students, who later became famous scientists, began their work - I. Sikorsky, A. Tupolev, S. Chaplygin. The Institute developed a method of mathematical calculation of the aircraft. During the war of 1914-1918, the Zhukovsky circle at the Moscow Higher Technical School, on the initiative of its leader, turned into a design and testing bureau for testing the aerodynamic properties of aircraft, the construction of which Russia had barely begun to start. Even before the war, at the same technical school, Zhukovsky organized aviation courses. From here came the first Russian pilots. Here Zhukovsky began to be the first in the world to give his course of lectures on the theoretical foundations of aeronautics. In 1918, the courses were transformed into the Moscow Institute of Air Force Engineers, which later became the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. For aircraft designers, many of those works of the great scientist, which he himself did not associate with aviation, also unexpectedly acquired significance. These are his works on hydrodynamics. Zhukovsky studied the laws that govern the behavior of bodies in a liquid medium in order to make these laws serve man, the creator of technology. But at the huge speeds of today's aircraft, air behaves like a liquid. So the formulas of Zhukovsky's hydrodynamic studies are also involved in the process of creating new aircraft. Zhukovsky was not only a theorist, but also a practitioner. One day, he was approached by the directorate of the Moscow water supply system with a request to improve the water faucet. The point was that if you abruptly close the taps, then the water pipes burst. Zhukovsky established that this was due to a shock wave that arose in the pipe when the tap was suddenly closed. On his advice, the design of the cranes was changed, and pipe ruptures stopped. Now this design is applied all over the world. After the October Revolution, Nikolai Yegorovich managed to make the few remaining years of his life years of fruitful, intense creativity. A seventy-year-old man in the years of poverty and devastation, in the early morning, walked along the snow-covered streets to the school, then through the whole city to the university - often only to give a lecture to three or four students. The troubles of life passed him by. Zhukovsky did not notice them, just as he did not notice the comfort that his family surrounded him with before. In 1918, the Central Institute of Aero- and Hydrodynamics (TsAGI) was established. The initial work on the organization of the institute took place in the dining room of Nikolai Yegorovich's apartment, allotted for this. TsAGI has become a major center for scientific research in the field of aircraft construction. It was there that the ANT-25 aircraft was developed, on which Valery Chkalov made a non-stop flight to America. On the idea and with the direct participation of Zhukovsky, the largest aviation educational institution was created - the Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI), as well as the Air Force Academy, which now bears his name. This descendant of Russian heroes fell ill in the spring of 1920 with pneumonia, then paralysis following the news of his daughter's death, then typhoid fever in December, and another apoplexy in the spring of the following year. March 17, 1921 Zhukovsky died. Author: Samin D.K.
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