Aleksey Nikolayevich Krylov was born on August 3
O.S., 1863 in Visyaga village near the town of Alatyr,
Simbirsk Governorate, Russian Empire (today Krylovo,
Chuvashia) to the family of a retired artillery officer. His father, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krylov (1830-1911), was the local landlord and
vice-Marshal of Nobility, but had relatively liberal views and later led the
zemskaya uprava (the Executive Board of the
Zemstvo self-government system) in Alatyr. His mother, née Sofya Viktorovna Lyapunova, was a member of the distinguished Lyapunov family (the mathematician
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov and musician
Sergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov were his second cousins). In 1878 Krylov entered the Naval College (rus. Морское училище) and graduated with distinction in 1884. There he did his first scientific work with
Ivan de Collong on
Deviation of magnetic
compasses. The theory of magnetic and gyro-compasses fascinated him for all of his life; later he published important works related to the dynamics of the magnetic compass and proposed the
dromoscope, a device that would automatically calculate the deviation of a compass. He also was a pioneer of the
gyrocompass, being the first to create a full theory of it. After spending several years at the Main Hydrographic Administration and at a shipbuilding plant (French-Russian shipbuilding company), in 1888 he continued his study in the
Naval Academy of
Saint Petersburg. He was a talented and promising student and after graduating ahead-of-schedule from the Academy in 1890, stayed on as
mathematics and
ship-theory lecturer. Fame came to him in the 1890s, when his pioneering
Theory of oscillating motions of the ship, significantly extending
William Froude's
rolling theory, became internationally known. This was the first comprehensive theoretical study in the field. In 1898 Krylov received a Gold Medal from the British
Royal Institution of Naval Architects, the first time the prize was awarded to a foreigner. He also created a theory of damping of ship rolling and pitching, and was the first to propose
gyroscopic damping which now is the most common way of damping the roll. After 1900 Krylov actively collaborated with
Stepan Makarov,
admiral and maritime scientist, working on the
ship floodability problem. The results of this work soon became classic and are used worldwide today. Years later, Krylov wrote about the early ideas of Makarov to fight the heel of a sinking ship by flooding its undamaged compartments: "This appeared to be such a great nonsense [to the naval officials] that it took 35 years… to convince [them] that the ideas of the 22-year-old Makarov are of great practical value". Krylov was well known for his sharp tongue and quick wits. His put downs to government and Duma officials were legendary. As a capable naval consultant, he claimed that his advice saved the government more than the cost of a
dreadnought. In 1917 he became CEO of the Russian society for shipbuilding and trade (the ROPiT, Русское общество пароходостроительства и торговли). After the
October Revolution he peacefully transferred the ROPiT merchant fleet to the Soviet government and continued to work for the Russian Navy. In 1921 he was sent to
London to re-establish scientific contacts, working there as a representative of the Soviet government. In 1927 he returned to the
Soviet Union. Krylov wrote about 300 papers and books. They span a wide range of topics, including
shipbuilding,
magnetism,
artillery,
mathematics,
astronomy, and
geodesy. His floodability tables have been used worldwide. Of note are his works in
hydrodynamics including theory of ships moving in shallow water (he was the first to explain and calculate the significant increase of hydrodynamic resistance in shallow water) and the theory of
solitons. In 1904 he built the first machine in Russia for
integrating Ordinary differential equations. In 1931 he published a paper on what is now called the
Krylov subspace and
Krylov subspace methods. The paper deals with
eigenvalue problems, namely, with computation of the
characteristic polynomial coefficients of a given
matrix. Krylov was concerned with efficient computations and, as a computational scientist, he counts the work as a number of separate numerical multiplications, something not very typical for a 1931 mathematical paper. Krylov begins with a careful comparison of the existing methods that include the worst-case-scenario estimate of the computational work in the
Jacobi method. Later, he presents his own method which is superior to the known methods of that time and is still widely used. Krylov also published the first Russian translation of
Isaac Newton's
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1915). Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov died in
Leningrad (i.e.
Saint Petersburg) on October 26, 1945, shortly after the end of
World War II. He is buried in the
Volkovo Cemetery, not far from the physiologist
Ivan Pavlov and the chemist
Dmitri Mendeleev. He was awarded the
Stalin Prize (1941), three
Orders of Lenin,
Hero of Socialist Labor (1943), and was an
academician of the
Russian Academy of Sciences (after 1916). The crater
Krylov on the
Moon is named after him, as are the
Krylov Peninsula and the
Krylov State Research Center (a shipbuilding research institute of which Krylov had been superintendent). In one of his autobiographical papers, Krylov describes his activity as 'shipbuilding, i.e. application of Mathematics to various Maritime problems.' ==Family==