Mikhail Ostrogradsky

Who was Mikhail Ostrogradsky?

Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky was a Ukrainian mathematician, mechanician and physicist. Ostrogradsky is considered to be a disciple of Leonhard Euler and one of the leading mathematicians of Imperial Russia.

Ostrogradsky was born in Pashennaya, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire. From 1816 to 1820 he studied under Timofei Fedorovich Osipovsky and graduated from the University of Kharkiv. When 1820 Osipovsky was suspended on religious grounds, Ostrogradsky refused to be examined and he never received his Doctor's 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, Also he becomes the professor of the Main military engineering School of the Russian empire.

He worked mainly in the mathematical fields of calculus of variations, integration of algebraic functions, number theory, algebra, geometry, probability theory and in the fields of applied mathematics, mathematical physics and classical mechanics.