Sergei Sobolev

Sergei Sobolev is born (September 23 old style) as the son of a lawyer. The father dies early; his mother Natalya, a highly educated teacher and physician, raises him.

Alongside school, Sobolev studies piano, the root of a lifelong love of classical music that colleagues would remark on decades later.

Sobolev's rise is meteoric: corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences at just 24.

Elected full member of the Academy at 30, Sobolev remains the youngest academician of the country for years afterward. His name lives on in the Sobolev spaces, a cornerstone of modern analysis.

Sobolev becomes a party member, a step that anchors him in the establishment and later helps make his name a political shield for others.

At the outbreak of war, Sobolev is appointed director of the Steklov Mathematical Institute and organizes applied research for the front from its evacuation quarters in Kazan. He wins his first Stalin Prize the same year.

Kantorovich writes a book-length account of optimizing an entire economy. His friend Sobolev sends it to Gosplan, to no effect. Shadow prices reflecting scarcity smell of market logic and are ideologically suspect.

Sobolev joins Laboratory No. 2 (the future Kurchatov Institute); from this moment his name disappears from the media. He becomes one of Kurchatov's deputies, working in Kikoin's group on uranium enrichment by gaseous diffusion. In these hidden years he also completes his masterwork on the function spaces now called Sobolev spaces.

Sobolev is entrusted with a classified seminar of Laboratory No. 2 whose participants include Landau, Fock, Tamm, Tikhonov, Khariton and Shchelkin.

For his atomic work Sobolev is made Hero of Socialist Labor; in total he holds three Stalin Prizes (1941, 1951, 1953) and seven Orders of Lenin, the accumulated authority he will later spend on protecting condemned sciences.

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.

Anatoly Kitov, who had discovered Wiener's 'Cybernetics' in the secret library of SKB-245, publishes 'The Main Features of Cybernetics' with Alexei Lyapunov and Sergei Sobolev, the first officially sanctioned positive assessment. Kitov and Lyapunov had prepared the ground with over 100 lectures in 1954-55.

Kitov's article, co-signed by Lyapunov and academician Sobolev to lend it authority, appears in Voprosy Filosofii as the first positive Soviet article on cybernetics, ending its official status as 'reactionary pseudoscience'. Lyapunov calls Kitov 'the first knight of Soviet cybernetics'.

'The Main Features of Cybernetics' by Sobolev, Kitov and Lyapunov appears in Voprosy Filosofii, the first officially sanctioned positive article on cybernetics in the USSR. Kitov wrote the text, Lyapunov finalized it and supplied the vision and network of students; Sobolev lent his authority.

When Lyapunov and Kitov visit him at his dacha in Zvenigorod with the draft defending cybernetics, Sobolev reads it and offers his name as co-author. 'The Main Features of Cybernetics' appears in Voprosy Filosofii with the atomic hero's signature as its political shield; he defends cybernetics repeatedly and publicly thereafter.

Like Lyapunov, Sobolev signs the letter denouncing Lysenko's monopoly over Soviet biology, using his decorated status for a persecuted science once again.

After the offended Bruk refuses to hand over an M-2 (Sobolev had voted for Lebedev, not Bruk, in the Academy elections), Sobolev declares: 'Let us build a computer for educational institutions ourselves.' At a seminar the task is formulated and Brusentsov named chief designer. Of Sobolev he said: 'When I first entered his office, it was as if sunlight floode

With Lavrentyev and Khristianovich, Sobolev is one of three initiators of the Siberian Branch, leaving Moscow at the peak of his fame. His own explanation: 'The natural desire of a person to live several lives, to begin something new.'