PERSONALIA

On the Seventieth Anniversary of T. P. Kravets

The Commission on the History of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, at its regular meeting, marked the 70th anniversary of the birth (born 22/III 1876) of the Deputy Chairman of the Commission, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR Torichan Pavlovich Kravets.

The chairman of the meeting, Academician V. I. Smirnov, in his introductory remarks, outlined the life and creative path of the jubilarian, his great scientific and organizational activity.

“People of science are of different kinds,” said V. I. Smirnov. “Some occupy themselves exclusively with their own scientific work and do not possess sufficient vital energy or a proper inclination toward broad communication. Such people influence others through their scientific labors. But there are people of science who have the desire and the ability to communicate with people. They influence other people not only through their scientific works, but also directly through their personality. These people are professors who attract large audiences, creators of schools, and public figures. Torichan Pavlovich Kravets belongs to such people.”

T. P. Kravets began his scientific life within the walls of Moscow University, in the years when the latter shone with the names of the greatest scholars in the fields of physics and mathematics, and listened to the lectures of N. E. Zhukovsky and A. Umov; he worked under P. N. Lebedev and N. D. Zelinsky. While still a student, he received a prize from the Society of Lovers of Natural Science for his work on the absorption and dispersion of short (centimeter) electric waves in water, carried out under the direction of P. N. Lebedev. On the recommendation of N. E. Zhukovsky, Torichan Pavlovich, after graduating from the university, was retained there for preparation for professorial activity. In 1898, the year he graduated from the university, he began working at the Moscow Engineering School (of Transport Communications), and there fate brought him together with the outstanding physicist A. A. Eichenwald. Work with A. A. Eichenwald, as with P. N. Lebedev, had great significance for the further activity of the beginning scholar.

In 1901 T. P. began lecturing at the Moscow Pedagogical Courses and at the Moscow Higher Women’s Courses and became ardently involved in the public movement that unfolded in the first years of the present century. The Russo-Japanese War tore him away from peaceful scientific and pedagogical work. T. P. was called up to the active army. After the end of the war he took up the study of light absorption in solutions of colored substances. This work, begun at the suggestion of P. N. Lebedev and carried out in his laboratory, resulted in a master’s dissertation, which T. P. defended at St. Petersburg University in 1913, already after Lebedev’s death.

In the same year 1913, Kharkov University elected him its professor. Working conditions in Kharkov were very difficult. T. P. had to engage in public work and in work on the organization of the university amid the conditions of the imperialist and then the civil war. But T. P. did not abandon scientific activity either. During this period he wrote a major work on light pressure from the electronic point of view.

Beginning in 1923, T. P. worked in Siberia, first in Omsk, then in Irkutsk, where he carried out research of a geophysical character. Together with his students he undertook work on investigating oscillations in the level of inland basins, in particular Lake Baikal, successfully studied the forced oscillations of this lake, and the propagation of seiches along the Angara, and so on.

In 1926 V. A. Steklov brought T. P. into work at the Physico-Mathematical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and soon, at the suggestion of D. S. Rozhdestvensky, he began working at the State Optical Institute, where he organized and headed the laboratory of scientific photography, transforming it under his leadership into one of the leading institutions in our country. “Widely known,” says V. I. Smirnov, “are those brilliant results that were obtained in this laboratory, both in theoretical terms and in the solution of purely practical problems in photography. The merit of T. P. Kravets lies in the fact that he was the first to create a large, broad school of scientific photography, which has given the country many excellent workers.”*)

V. I. Smirnov dwells on the work of Torichan Pavlovich in the history of physics. “T. P. Kravets,” he emphasizes, “has not only a taste for the history of science, in particular for the history of physics, but also the gift of reproducing it in a perfect literary form.”

The role of Torichan Pavlovich as a teacher of physics in higher educational institutions is quite exceptional. Through his lecture hall at Leningrad University have passed thousands of students, and the university well knows the lectures of T. P. Kravets—brilliant in form, profound and interesting in content. But his activity at the university is not limited to teaching. The temperament of a public-minded man, which has marked T. P. throughout his life, also advances him here to a leading role in the organization of university education.

The outstanding scientific and scientific-organizational activity of the scholar was marked by his election in 1943 as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Torichan Pavlovich has been awarded the Orders of the “Red Banner of Labor,” the “Red Star,” the “Badge of Honor,” and the medal “For the Defense of Leningrad.”

“Our generation, to which I too belong,” concludes V. I. Smirnov, “has had to live through fateful moments of history, and many years of our life must be multiplied by coefficients that are difficult even to estimate... Torichan Pavlovich has lived 70 years, counting without a coefficient, and I fruitfully, insistently wish him health and many years of life and activity for the benefit of our society and state.”

M. Radovsky