Slava Gerovitch

Slava Gerovitch
Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT · Department of Mathematics

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55
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Introduction
Slava Gerovitch currently works at the Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He does research in history of Soviet science and history of mathematics. His current project is on social history of Soviet mathematics, including specialized math schools and the Gelfand seminar.

Publications

Publications (55)
Article
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In the late 1960s and 70s, due to the Soviet regime’s crackdown on dissident activities and rising anti-Semitic policies, many mathematicians from “undesirable” groups faced discrimination and serious administrative restrictions on work and study at top-ranking official institutions. To overcome such barriers, the mathematical community built exten...
Chapter
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American and Soviet AI specialists were seeking out general principles: universal, timeless mechanisms of thinking and behaviour. Their generalizations, however, were based on culturally conditioned cases. The examples that American and Soviet scientists had at their disposal, were, in fact, culturally specific patterns of social organization and d...
Article
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В статье анализируется реакция советского математического сообщества на те географические барьеры, физические препятствия, политическое и административное давление и концептуальные ограничения, с которыми столкнулась советская математика с 1950-х по 1980-е годы. Многие талантливые математики попадали в категорию этнически или политически нежелатель...
Chapter
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Israel Gelfand’s weekly seminar at Moscow State University, which ran continuously from 1943 to 1989, has gained a legendary status in the Russian mathematics community. It evokes a mixture of admiration and revulsion. Did the style of the seminar merely reflect the eccentric personality of its leader, or did it indicate some broader cultural patte...
Article
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Consider a finite set of lines in 3-space. A joint is a point where three of these lines (not lying in the same plane) intersect. If there are L lines, what is the largest possible number of joints? Well, let’s try our luck and randomly choose k planes. Any pair of planes produces a line, and any triple of planes, a joint. Thus, they produce L := k...
Book
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space pr...
Chapter
Abram Borisovich Krayzman was born on October 17, 1918, in Korosten, Ukraine. In October 1941 he completed accelerated training at the Stalin Armored Tank Academy in Moscow and joined the 15th Separate Guards Mortar (Katyusha) Battalion of the Reserve of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Krayzman served with Katyusha units throughout World War II. In...
Chapter
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Shatalov was born on December 8, 1927, in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan. In 1949 he graduated from the Kachinskoye Highest Military Aviation School for fighter pilots in Krasnyy Kut in the Saratov region. After graduation, he stayed at the school as a pilot instructor. In 1956 Shatalov graduated with honors from the Air Force Ac...
Chapter
Yuriy Aleksandrovich Tyapchenko was born on March 26, 1938, in the Krasnodar region. He graduated from the Moscow Power Institute in 1961 as an electrical engineer and joined Sergey Darevskiy’s laboratory at a branch of the Flight Research Institute (LII) in Zhukovskiy near Moscow. In 1967 this laboratory formed the Specialized Experimental Design...
Chapter
Ada (Ida) Borisovna Ordyanskaya was born on December 2, 1926. She graduated from medical school and worked at the Scientific-Research Institute of Psychiatry of the Russian Federation Ministry of Health in Moscow. She was a leading specialist in schizophrenia psychotherapy, in stress relief, and in suicide prevention. She is the author of a psychia...
Chapter
Georgiy Moiseyevich Priss was born on July 11, 1925. In 1948 he graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute and joined the Scientific-Research Institute No. 885 (NII-885), which designed control systems for rocketry. Since 1963 Priss worked at the Scientific-Research Institute of Automatics and Instrument Building (NII AP), which separated from NI...
Chapter
Dr. Felix Lipmanovich Meschansky was born in Moscow in 1926. He worked in the field of rocket and space radio communications from 1954 to 1986. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Geodesy Engineering in 1948 and received his candidate of science degree in 1952 and the doctor of science degree in 1972. He worked at the Central Scientific-Resea...
Chapter
Ordinard Panteleymonovich Kolomiytsev was born on January 29, 1933, in Tula. In 1956 he graduated from Saratov State University with a diploma in radiophysics. He joined the Institute of Earth Magnetism, Ionosphere, and Radio Wave Propagation (IZMIRAN) of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Troitsk near Moscow. In the years from 1957 to 1963 he took...
Chapter
Sergey Samoylovich Safro was born in Leningrad in 1938. In 1960 he graduated from the Leningrad Construction-Engineering Institute and was sent to work at Tyuratam (Baykonur) Cosmodrome as a military construction engineer. In 1962 he was transferred to the construction of a missile launch site near Krasnoyarsk. After leaving the Army, he returned t...
Chapter
Mikhail Nikolayevich Burdayev was born on August 27, 1932, in Feodosiya, Crimea. In 1956 he graduated with honors from the Mozhayskiy Air Force Engineering Academy. In the years from 1956 to 1959 Burdayev served as a senior technician, then as a squadron engineer at an aircraft carrier; from 1959 to 1969 he worked as a researcher, then a senior res...
Chapter
Valentina Leonidovna Ponomareva (maiden name Kovalevskaya) was born on September 18, 1933, in Moscow. In 1957 she graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute as an engineer, specializing in liquid propellant rocket engines. In the years from 1957 to 1962 she worked as an engineer at the Applied Mathematics Division of the Mathematical Institute of...
Chapter
Viktor Vladimirovich Przhiyalkovskiy was born on March 2, 1930, in the town of Serpukhov in the Moscow region. In 1953 he graduated from the Moscow Power Institute as an engineer specializing in the design of gauging instruments and automatic devices. Between the years 1953 and 1956, he worked as an engineer and senior engineer at the Penza branch...
Chapter
Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev was born on July 2, 1935, in Moscow. He is the son of the Soviet leader Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. In 1958 he graduated from the Moscow Power Institute as an engineer specializing in electrical vacuum technology and special equipment. From 1958 to 1968 he worked at the Joint Design Bureau No. 52 (OKB-52), led by Gener...
Chapter
Anatoliy Davidovich Daron was born on April 26, 1926, in Odessa, Ukraine. In 1948 he graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute as an engineer specializing in liquid propellant rocket engines. After graduation he worked for 50 years at the Experimental Design Bureau No. 456 (OKB-456), led by the Chief Designer of Rocket Engines Valentin Glushko....
Book
Despite the wealth of information and archival material that has become available in the years following the fall of the USSR, the history of the Soviet space program has been dominated by the accounts of a select few, such as the recent four-volume English translation of Russian rocket designer Boris Chertok. In this remarkable oral history, autho...
Article
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This slim though rich, cogently argued, and highly readable book is an excellent example of how applying a new analytical framework leads to fresh insights on a familiar subject. Popular imagination has been saturated with NASA's image-making, astronauts' self-fashioning, politically charged accounts loaded with either glorifications or accusations...
Article
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The postwar period is often viewed as the "Golden Age" of Soviet mathematics, yet the mathematical community in that period faced serious constraints. Restrictions on foreign travel, limited access to foreign literature, obsessive secrecy regulations, an obsolete university curriculum, the declining level of the faculty, discriminatory policies in...
Article
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Der Kalte Krieg führte nicht nur zum Wettrüsten und zum Wettlauf ins Weltall, es gab auch einen weniger bekannten, doch nicht weniger bedeutsamen Wettstreit zwischen den beiden Welten – ein Wettrennen um die Infrastruktur der Informationstechnologie. Das war eine weniger spektakuläre, vielleicht aber die fundamentalste Form der Systemkonkurrenz. De...
Chapter
Memories of the space age occupy a prominent place in contemporary Russian culture. In the year 2007 alone, the Russians celebrated the 150th anniversary of the space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, the 120th anniversary of the Soviet rocketry pioneer Fridrikh Tsander, and the 50th anniversaries of the first intercontinental ballistic missile (R...
Article
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The history of cybernetics is the history of a misunderstanding in the Cold War. Because the United States was fascinated by cybernetics in the 1950s, the Soviet Union rejected the subject. When Soviet scientists extolled the new possibilities for management, the CIA sensed danger. In the United States, cybernetics were now rejected rhetorically, b...
Article
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This article examines several Soviet initiatives to develop a national computer network as the technological basis for an automated information system for the management of the national economy in the 1960s-1970s. It explores the mechanism by which these proposals were circulated, debated, and revised in the maze of Party and government agencies. T...
Article
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This article explores the impact of the professional culture of rocket engineering in Stalin's Soviet Union on the engineering and organizational practices of the space program during the Khrushchev era. The Stalinist legacy and the dual military / civil-ian character of rocket engineers' work profoundly affected the identity of this elite part of...
Article
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Soviet propaganda often used the Soviet space program as a symbol of a much larger and more ambitious political/engineering project-the construction of communism. Both projects involved the construction of a new self, and the cosmonaut was often regarded as a model for the "new Soviet man." The Soviet cosmonauts publicly represented a communist ide...
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Automation is the conversion of a work process, a procedure, or equipment to automatic rather than human operation or control. Automation does not simply transfer human functions to machines, but involves a deep reorganization of the work process, during which both the human and the machine functions are redefined. Early automation relied on mechan...
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Argument Every new level achieved by technology attracted the attention of physiologists and turned their thoughts in a new direction; they often unwittingly modeled life processes in the image of contemporary engineering achievements. –(Nikolay Bernshteyn [1958] 1997, 392) This article reinterprets the debate between orthodox followers of the Pavl...
Book
In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new...
Article
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Soviet science in the post-WWII period was torn between two contradictory directives: to 'overtake and surpass' Western science, especially in defence-related fields; and to 'criticize and destroy' Western scholarship for its alleged ideological flaws. In response to this dilemma. Soviet scientists developed two opposite discursive strategies. Whil...
Article
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Les changements methodologiques, temporels, thematiques, disciplinaires et geographiques de la technologie et de la science sovietique sont analyses durant la periode de la Prestroika, a partir d'une etude d'un journal traitant des problemes de l'histoire des sciences et des technologies

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