He was born in
Rostov-on-Don,
Russian SFSR, in the family of a mining engineer. Glushkov graduated from
Rostov State University in 1948, and in 1952 proposed solutions to
Hilbert's fifth problem and defended his thesis at
Moscow State University. In 1956, he began working with computers and worked in
Kiev as a Director of the Computational Center of the
Academy of Science of Ukraine. In 1958, he became a member of the
Communist Party. In 1962, Glushkov established the famous
Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine and became its first director. He made contributions to the
theory of automata. He and his followers (Kapitonova, Letichevskiy and others) successfully applied that theory to enhance construction of computers. His book on that topic
Synthesis of Digital Automata became well known. For that work, he was awarded the
Lenin Prize in 1964 and elected as a member of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences. He greatly influenced many other fields of theoretical computer science (including the theory of programming and artificial intelligence) as well as its applications in the Soviet Union. He published nearly 800 printed works. One of his great practical goals was the creation of the National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing (
OGAS), consisting of a
computer network to manage the allocation of resources and information among organizations in the national economy, which would represent a higher form of
socialist planning than the extant
centrally planned economy. This ambitious project was ahead of its time, first being proposed and modeled in 1962. It received opposition from many senior Communist Party leaders who felt the system threatened Party control of the economy. By the early 1970s, official interest in this system had ended. Glushkov founded the Chair of Theoretical Cybernetics and Methods of Optimal
Control at the
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1967, and the Chair of Theoretical Cybernetics at
Kiev State University in 1969. The Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine, which he created, is named after him. ==Honors and awards==