User:TheGoblin/S. S. Kovner

Semyon Samsonovich Kovner (1896—1962) was a Russian mathematician, geophysicist, and science administrator.

Biography
He was born on February 22, 1896 in Moscow in the family of a factory nurse.

He studied in the school of E. A. Kirpichnikova, and from 1905 in the 10th Moscow Gymnasium, from which he graduated with a medal in 1914. For one year he was a student at the Moscow Urban University Of the People (in the name of A. Shanyavskiy). In 1915 he entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University. In 1918, as a student, he wrote his first independent article under the guidance of Professor B. K. Mlodzievsky: "On Transcendental Curves on Riemann surfaces".

After graduation in 1921, on the recommendation of Professor D.F. Egorov he was left at the university to prepare for a professorship. From October 1920 he was senior assistant, then privat-docent.

Fluent in several languages (German, English, Italian, French, Esperanto), S. S. Kovner translated several books: "The Secrets of the skilled calculator" by Menhen, "Probability Theory" by O. Meissner, "Introduction to the calculus of infinitesimals" by A. Witting,[en] "New trigonometry" by Locke and Childe.

He repeatedly went abroad for training; in 1923 he was, together with P. S. Uryson and P. S. Alexandrov, visited Göttingen and Berlin, where he listened to lectures by D. Hilbert, E. Landau, and A. Einstein; in 1924 he was again in Göttingen - together with P. S. Alexandrov, B. I. Kovner, V. V. Stepanov, and Y. A. Rozhanskaya[1]. In 1924 Kovner enrolled in the graduate school of the Research Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics at Moscow State University and graduated from it in 1929. Since 1927 he was an associate professor at Moscow University; in 1929 he published a course on higher mathematics. In January 1930 he was appointed head of the department of mathematics of the geophysical faculty of Moscow State University; after transformation of the faculty into the Moscow Hydrometeorological Institute he was head of the mathematics department there until 1935; besides he was professor and head of the mathematics department of the Moscow Textile Institute from May 1931 to the end of his life.

In addition to his teaching activities, S. S. Kovner worked at the State Research Geophysical Institute, rising from researcher (November 1925) to deputy director for science (1932-1933). Between June 1935 and October 1937 he worked as a senior researcher at the Institute of Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences; then as head of the department of mathematical geophysics at the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. On May 25, 1938 he was awarded a scientific degree of Candidate of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics without defending a thesis.

In May 1927 S. S. Kovner to the Presidium of the Moscow Regional Executive Committee came up with the initiative to build a planetarium in Moscow, and was included in the commission for its construction. After its construction O. Schmidt said:

"The Soviet public will always be grateful to S. S. Kovner for his selfless and energetic work on the creation of the Moscow Planetarium.

In November 1941, Kovner evacuated with the Institute of Geophysics to Kazan, where, together with O. Schmidt, he continued to edit the journal "Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. Geographic and Geophysical Series"[2].

From 1947 he was head of the geothermal laboratory of the Institute of Geophysics.

He is buried at Vostryakovsky Jewish cemetery[3].