Andrei Ershov

Andrei Ershov is born in Moscow; his father is a chemical engineer, his mother a librarian.

In the 1952/53 academic year, Lyapunov delivers the country's first programming course at Moscow University. Among those shaped by it is Andrei Ershov, the future 'programmer No. 1' of the USSR.

Ershov finishes Moscow University's mech-math faculty in the USSR's first class of university-educated programmers, a student of Sobolev and of Lyapunov, who taught the country's first programming course in 1952-53.

At the Teddington conference, programming pioneer Andrei Ershov meets John McCarthy, an almost unthinkable Cold War friendship. In 1965 McCarthy becomes the first Westerner allowed to visit Novosibirsk, home of Ershov's programming school.

Presenting Soviet work on automatic programming at England's National Physical Laboratory, Ershov meets John McCarthy, the beginning of a lifelong transatlantic friendship and collaboration.

The division of Europe becomes concrete. The bloc borders also seal off scientists from each other, making contacts like Ershov-McCarthy a rarity.

Ershov becomes the first programmer elected corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences; full membership follows in 1984.

'Foundations of Informatics and Computing Technology' enters Soviet schools, driven by Andrei Ershov's credo of 'programming as the second literacy'.

Championing the slogan 'programming is the second literacy', Ershov writes the curriculum and first textbook as 'Fundamentals of Informatics and Computing' becomes a nationwide school subject.

The founder of the Siberian programming school (a scientist who wrote poetry, translated Kipling, played guitar and left about 5,000 letters, including replies to puzzled schoolchildren) dies at 57.

Novosibirsk's Institute of Informatics Systems is later named for him and keeps his memorial archive of thousands of letters and papers.