6 - The Russian school

Summary

The towering figure of Kolmogorov and his very productive school is what was perceived in the twentieth century as the Russian school of turbulence. However, important Russian contributions neither start nor end with that school.

Physicist and pilot

… the bombs were falling almost the way the theory predicts. To have conclusive proof of the theory I'm going to fly again in a few days.

A.A. Friedman, letter to V.A. Steklov, 1915

What seems to be the first major Russian contribution to the turbulence theory was made by Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, famous for his work on non-stationary relativistic cosmology, which has revolutionized our view of the Universe. Friedman's biography reads like an adventure novel. Alexander Friedman was born in 1888 to a well-known St. Petersburg artistic family (Frenkel, 1988). His father, a ballet dancer and a composer, descended from a baptized Jew who had been given full civil rights after serving 25 years in the army (a so-called cantonist). His mother, also a conservatory graduate, was a daughter of the conductor of the Royal Mariinsky Theater. His parents divorced in 1897, their son staying with the father and becoming reconciled with his mother only after the 1917 revolution. While attending St. Petersburg's second gymnasium (the oldest in the city) Friedman befriended a fellow student Yakov Tamarkin, who later became a famous American mathematician and with whom he wrote their first scientific works (on number theory, received positively by David Hilbert).