The Ukrainian Mathematician and the Ukrainian Patriot

Ukraine has given the world a number of outstanding figures who have made their remarkable contributions to world’s science and culture. One of them was a mathematician of a world standing – academician Mykhailo Kravchuk.

Mykhailo Kravchuk was born in the land of Volyn, Ukraine, in 1892. In 1914 he graduated from the Department of Physics and Mathematics, St. Volodymyr University in Kyiv. After graduation, he came back to the university to teach and do research and in 1924 he earned his Ph.D (Doctor of Philosophy). In 1929 he was elected Academician of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In the period from 1921 to 1938 he worked at the Kyiv Polytechnic, rapidly rising through academic ranks to full professorship and head of the Department of Higher Mathematics. In 1938 he was arrested, charged with “support of Ukrainian nationalism” and “spying for the imperialist powers”. He died four years later, in March 1942, in a concentration camp in Kolyma, Northern Russia, where so many of the GULAG camps were concentrated.

Anyone who studies higher mathematics comes across “Kravchuk moment”, “Kravchuk formulas”,”Kravchuk oscillators”, and other mathe-matical terms associated with Mykhailo Kravchuk whose contribution to mathematics is a vast one indeed. He has authored works in various branches of mathematics: algebra, theory of numbers, function theory, theory of integral and differential equations, theory of probability, mathematical statistics and history of mathematics. Most of Kravchuk’s works deal with the most fundamental problems of mathematics, with the remaining ones devoted to applied mathematics, called upon to help solve more pragmatic problems.

Kravchuk was elected to the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1929. Thus he became a full member of the Academy at age 37 – there is only a handful of people honoured to become academicians at such an early age in the history of science.

Most of his pioneering works have been written in Ukrainian. Kravchuk considered it his civic duty to develop both science and language to express the scientific findings…

Some years ago there was discovered evidence in the archives of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and in the archives of the State University of Iowa that the creator of the first electronic computer John Atanasov had used Kravchuk’s mathematical findings and even had Kravchuk’s work “Use of the Means of Moments for Solving Differential and Integral Equations” translated into English back in the late 1930s.

Among Kravchuk’s disciples and students we find such remarkable figures as Serhiy Korolyov, the Soviet rocket designer and main force behind the Soviet space programme, responsible for the first Sputnik launched in October 1957 and the first manned space flight in April 1961, and Archyp Lyulka, the designer of aircraft engines. Lyulka’s friends recollect that in the study of his Moscow apartment he always had portraits of Taras Shevchenko and Mykhailo Kravchuk, hanging side by side on the wall. There were hundreds of others who learned a lot from Kravchuk the scientist and Kravchuk the Ukrainian patriot.

In independent Ukraine, Kravchuk’s name was brought back from oblivion. In 1992 memorial plaques were installed in his native place in Volyn and at the building in Kyiv where he lived and where he was arrested in 1938. The Kyiv Polytechnic holds regular conferences in his memory, devoted to his scientific legacy and to other related scientific and mathematical problems. In 2003 a monument to Kravchuk was unveiled at the polytechnic campus.

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