Victor Glushkov

Victor Mikhailovich Glushkov (Russian: Ви́ктор Миха́йлович Глушко́в; August 24, 1923 – January 30, 1982) was a Ukrainian Soviet mathematician, the founding father of information technology in the Soviet Union, and one of the founders of Cybernetics. 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 in Moscow State University.

In 1956 he began working in computer science 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.

He made contributions to the theory of automata. He and his followers (Kapitonova, Letichevskiy and other) 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 Academy of Science of USSR.

He greatly influenced many other fields of theoretical computer science (including the theory of programming and artificial intelligence) as well as its applications in USSR. He published nearly 800 printed works.

One of his great practical goals was the creation of a National Automatized System of Administration of Economy (OGAS), which included the establishment of a network of computers 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 Stalinist command 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 ended.

Glushkov founded a Kiev-based Chair of Theoretical Cybernetics and Methods of Optimal Control at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1967 and a Chair of Theoretical Cybernetics at Kiev State University in 1969. The Institute of Cybernetics of National Academy of Science of Ukraine, which he created, is named after him.

Honors and awards