Krawtchouk's Mind

A reader writes: "Central Europe Review is running an article on a gulag-condemned Soviet scientist whose contribution to the first computer is virtually unknown because of the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story tells of how in 1937, American digital computer pioneer John Atanasoff came across a Myhailo Krawtchouk paper on a new method for finding approximate solutions to differential equations. Atanasoff tried sending a letter to him, but received no response. Krawtchouk had been attainted for giving a favorable review of the work of "enemies of the people" and shipped to Siberia for 20 years of gold mining, where he died four years later. Krawtchouk's biography gives a more detailed account of how Krawtchouk was labeled a "Polish spy" and "Ukrainian nationalist," stripped of his Academy of Sciences membership, and forced to sign a confession -- that he later retracted -- under torture and threats upon his family. "

Comments

err...

[Joe the Lesser]

..the Cold War mentality that infected much of society on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The story tells of how in 1937...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII, in the late 1940's.

Re:err...

[LizardKing]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII

Correct, Churchill gave the Iron Curtain speech after World War II. However, a "cold war" did exist between the Soviet Union and leading western states ever since the October Revolution. Until the Axis invasion of 1941, the Soviet Union was seen as much of a bogeyman as Hitler's Germany. In fact, Britain had toyed with the idea of declaring war on the USSR in the Winter of 1939 - under the pretext of aiding Finland which was being invaded by Stalin at the time, but really as an excuse to occupy ore-rich Sweden.

Chris

Re:err...

[Mister Black]

In the 1930s, Lenin was in power in Russia and he started the gulag camps in Russia, which after only a few years grew to some 4800 camps throughout the USSR, enslaingmillions of "traitors".

Wow, that's quite an accomplishment for a guy that died in 1924. Must have been all the borsch and vodka.

From '22 to '53 it was all Joe

Re:err...

[Snart Barfunz]

True. However, 70,000 people were interned in the UK, most of them European Jews. Unless, like my grandfather, they were unfortunate enough to be forcibly repatriated to Germany. Bogus asylum seekers indeed.

Re:err...

[crawling_chaos]

Of course, ore-rich Sweden was shipping as much iron ore as possible to Nazi Germany because they were afraid that if they didn't, Hitler would invade and take it anyway. The Brits and the French tried to convince the Swedes not to do this, but the supposedly neutral Sweden continued to ship ore to the Germans until it became obvious that Germany had lost the war. At that point, faced with an invasion threat from the Soviets, they chose to stop shipments. Many of the tanks and U-Boats that the Allies faced in the war were built with Swedish iron.

So, you see, Churchill's plan to invade Sweden was designed to distrupt the German war effort, not simply a land-grab.

Re:Geek Persecution

[LizardKing]

This isn't really even a communist thing. Geek persecution on both sides of the wall was rough. I mean, where's Alan Turing?

While the establishment's treatment of Turing was a disgrace, I think it pales into insignificance compared to Stalin's terror. For an excellent introduction to life at the time of the purges, I can highly recommend Solzhenitsyn's "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich", closely followed by his "Gulag Archipelago". It's a while since I read the latter, but I'm pretty sure it's the one that fictionalised Russian scientists working in an "intelligentsia prison".

Chris

jjayson on kuro5hin.org got ripped off

[circletimessquare]

unless he is the "a reader" that submitted the story

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/27/5153/73626

note the word-for-word plagiarization/ lifting

just trying to keep it honest

An earlier Difference Engine....

[hughk]

was the one devised by Charles Babbage around 1832. It was started but never completed. However, part of the calculating section was produced in 1832. Babbage revised his design to simplify it but the second version was not produced. The Difference Engine No. 2 was produced from Babbage's plans by the Science Museum in Britain to verify that it would work. The team building it restricted themselves to manufacturing accuracies attainable 150 years ago. It worked after the correction of some small errors, which were felt to be deliberate (the Victorians feared espionage and frequently introduced a few deliberate mistakes into technical drawings.

The printer was completed in 2000. It featured variable spacing and line wrapping. Not bad for something that is 100% mechanical.

It should be noted that as with the machine talked about here, this was a machine for solving simple differential equations (tides) as well as more standard types of maths (i.e., logs, sines and so on) for the production of tables. It was not a general purpose computer, that term was reserved for his Analytical Engine - which was designed but never produced. However Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace wrote some programs for it, converting equations into algorithms and generating register settings which could be punched on the Jacquard cards (Babbage pinched this idea from the manufacturers of automatic-looms, a long time before Hollerith).

If Babbage had completed the Analytical engine, we could have been in a very different world. One version would have been hypothesized in William Gibson's "The Difference Engine".

Cold Wars

[hughk]

You are absolutely correct, but Stalin in the thirties was already feeling insecure and taking desparate measures to keep the USSR from fragmenting and the resistance to his land reform program (which caused the death of millions from starvation). He was less concerned about western influences after the twenties as it was already difficult to enter the USSR uninvited or to travel outside. Krawtchouk being a nationalist Ukrainian, was extremly lucky not to be immediately shot. In any case, Stalin disliked intellectuals, hence the Doctor's "plot" in 1953, and killing off the officer corps which almost led to the defeat of the Russian Army in the Winter War against Finland.

Churchill's famous speech referred to the effective extension of Soviet borders to that of the European countries under their influence after the war.