Anatoly Dorodnitsyn

Anatoly Dorodnitsyn is born in Bashino in the Tula Governorate, the son of a rural doctor.

High-speed flight makes compressible-gas theory urgent; Dorodnitsyn joins the Zhukovsky Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute to work on the boundary layer.

His change of variables for boundary-layer problems in compressible gas, published in 1942, becomes a textbook classic bearing his name; he defends his doctorate the same year.

Dorodnitsyn becomes an academician in the physics-mathematics division (geophysics).

The Computing Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences is founded with Dorodnitsyn as director. First factory copies of new Soviet computers are installed there for testing, and he chairs the state commissions that accept most Soviet machines into service.

At the highest government level the USSR decides to copy the IBM System/360 as the ES EVM ('Ryad') instead of continuing its own BESM and Minsk lines, against the resistance of leading computer scientists. Babayan later calls it a cardinal error that 'destroyed' domestic innovation; scientists had to study outdated Western software and rewrite it from scratc

Having attended the first ten IFIP congresses, Dorodnitsyn leads the International Federation for Information Processing from 1968 to 1971, Soviet computing's most visible international post.

Alexei Pajitnov at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center programs Tetris in Pascal on an Elektronika 60 (a PDP-11 clone) in his spare time; the machine has no graphics, so the pieces are made of bracket characters. It spreads through Moscow on copied floppies; the computing center itself holds the rights for ten years, and they revert to Pajitnov only at the end of 1995.

The Computing Centre he founded (now the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre) carries his name.