OTTO SCHMIDT

'Otto Yulievich Schmidt' (; — September 7, 1956) was a Soviet scientist, mathematician, astronomer, geophysicist, statesman, academician, Hero of the USSR (6.27.1937), member of the Communist Party.
He was born in Mogilyov, Imperial Russia (now Belarus). In 1913, Schmidt graduated from the University of Kiev, where he worked as a privat-docent starting from 1916. After the October Revolution of 1917, he was a board member at a few People's Commissariats (narkomats), such as Narkomprod from 1918-1920 (Narodnyi Komissariat Prodovolstviya, or People's Commissariat for Supplies), Narkomfin from 1921-1922 (Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, or People's Commissariat for Finances). Schmidt was one of the chief proponents of developing the higher education system, publishing, and science in Soviet Russia.
He worked at Narkompros (Narodnyi Komissariat Prosvescheniya, or People's Commissariat for Education), the State Scientific Board at the Soviet of People's Commissars of the USSR, and the Communist Academy. Schmidt was also employed as the director of the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) from 1921-1924, and chief editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia from 1924-1941. From 1923-1956, he was a professor at the Moscow State University, and from 1930-1932, Schmidt was the head of the Arctic Institute.
From 1932-1939, he was appointed head of Glavsevmorput' (Glavnoe upravlenie Severnogo Morskogo Puti) - an establishment that oversaw all commercial operations on the Northern Sea Route. From 1939-1942, Schmidt became a vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he organized the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics (he was its director until 1949). Otto Schmidt is a founder of the Moscow Algebra School, which he directed for many years to come.
In mid 1940s, Schmidt suggested a new cosmogonical hypothesis on the formation of the Earth and other planets of the Solar system, which he continued to develop together with a group of Soviet scientists until his death.

Schmidt was a celebrated explorer of the Arctic. In 1929 and 1930, he led expeditions on the steam icebreaker ''Georgy Sedov'', establishing the first scientific research station on the Franz Josef Land, exploring the northwestern parts of the Kara Sea and western coasts of Severnaya Zemlya, and discovering a few islands. In 1932, Schmidt's expedition on the steam icebreaker ''Sibiryakov'' made a non-stop voyage from Arkhangelsk to the Pacific Ocean for the first time in history. From 1933-1934, Schmidt led the voyage of the steamship ''Cheliuskin'' along the Northern Sea Route. In 1937, he supervised an expedition that established a drift-ice research station "North Pole - 1". In 1938, he was in charge of evacuating its personnel from the ice.
Otto Schmidt was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the first convocation. He was awarded three Orders of Lenin, three other orders and many medals. An island in the Kara Sea, a cape on the coastline of the Chukchi Sea, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, Institute of the Earth Physics at the Soviet Academy of Science and others bear Schmidt's name.

Contents

References

References

★ Aleksey E. Levin, Stephen G. Brush ''The Origin of the Solar System: Soviet Research 1925-1991''. AIP Press, 1995. ISBN 1-56396-281-0

★ Brontman, L.K. ''On top of the world: the Soviet expedition to the North pole, 1937-1938'', New York, 1938.

★ McCannon, John. ''Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932-1939''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

★ ''Otto Iul'evich Shmidt: Zhizn' i deiatel'nost'. Moscow: Nauka, 1959.

★ Otto Yulievich Shmidt