Irina Grekova
Soviet and Russian mathematician and writer (1907-2002)
Elena Sergeevna Ventsel (Russian: Еле́на Серге́евна Ве́нтцель; maiden name Dolgintseva, 21 March 1907, Reval — 15 April 2002, Moscow), known by the pen name Irina Grekova (often shortened to I. Grekova, this pen name is a pun on y in mathematics, which sounds in russian as "igrek"), was a Soviet writer and mathematician. She held a Ph.D. in mathematics, and wrote several influential textbooks on probability theory, game theory, and operations research.
Biography
Her father taught mathematics and her mother taught literature. Believing that higher mathematics was actually simpler than arithmetic, he began giving her lessons when she was only seven or eight.
In 1923, when she was sixteen, she entered Petrograd University (now Saint Petersburg State University), where she studied with Boris Delaunay, Ivan Vinogradov, Gury Kolosov and Grigorii Fichtenholz, among others. In 1929, she graduated from the Physics and Mathematics Department.
From 1935 to 1969, she worked at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy then, from 1969 to 1987, at the Moscow State University of Railway Engineering. She began writing prose in 1962 and became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1967.
Grekova's novella, "The Ship of Widows," told the story of five widows who shared a kommunalka together "from the time immediately following WWII until the 1960s."
Her husband, Dimitri Ventsel, was a Major General and head of the ballistics department at the Air Force Academy.
Her son Alexander D. Wentzell is a Russian-American mathematician.
“Irina Grekova” enters the record as soviet and Russian mathematician and writer (1907-2002). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Irina, Grekova and Soviet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Irina Grekova” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Irina, Grekova and Soviet provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q201472. VIAF identifies the subject as 39389157. The Library of Congress control number is n82210202. 6 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1907, 2002, 1923 and 1929.
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This entry incorporates text from “Irina Grekova” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.