Mikhail Ostrogradsky
Ukrainian mathematician (1801–1861)
Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky (Russian: Михаи́л Васи́льевич Острогра́дский; 24 September 1801 – 1 January 1862), also known as Mykhailo Vasyliovych Ostrohradskyi (Ukrainian: Миха́йло Васи́льович Острогра́дський), was a Russian Imperial mathematician, mechanician, and physicist of Ukrainian Cossack ancestry. Ostrogradsky was a student of Timofei Osipovsky and is considered to be a disciple of Leonhard Euler, who was known as one of the leading mathematicians of Imperial Russia.
Life
Ostrogradsky was born on 24 September 1801 in the village of Pashenivka (at the time in the Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire, today in Kremenchuk Raion, Poltava Oblast, Ukraine). From 1816 to 1820, he studied under Timofei Osipovsky (1765–1832) and graduated from the Imperial University of Kharkov. When Osipovsky was suspended on religious grounds in 1820, Ostrogradsky refused to be examined and he never received his Ph.D. degree. From 1822 to 1826, he studied at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France in Paris, France. In 1828, he returned to the Russian Empire and settled in Saint Petersburg, where he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. He also became a professor of the main military engineering school of the Russian Empire.
Ostrogradsky died in Poltava in 1862, aged 60. The Kremenchuk Mykhailo Ostrohradskyi National University in Kremenchuk, Poltava oblast, as well as Ostrogradsky street in Poltava, are named after him.
“Mikhail Ostrogradsky” enters the record as ukrainian mathematician (1801–1861). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mikhail, Ostrogradsky and Ukrainian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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