Alexander Kronrod

He slowly recovered when a stroke took his speech and ability to read and write but was forced to resign at the Central Geophysical Expedition and stop all work on math. He saved his own life by asking to be soaked in a tub of very hot water for several hours after a second stroke. He died on 6 October 1986 of a third stroke.

When the Communist Party reprimanded him in 1968 for cosigning a letter with many mathematicians in defense of the mathematician and logician Alexander Esenin-Volpin, a son of the poet Sergei Esenin, the physicists were able to oust him from ITEP. He was also fired from his professorship.

In 1965, ITEP challenged and in 1966–1967 defeated the American chess program Kotok-McCarthy. The developers included Adelson-Velsky who used A.L. Brudno's adversarial search algorithm and a "general recursive search scheme" by Kronrod. They were advised by Russian chess master A.R. Bitman and world champion Mikhail Botvinnik in what was the first test of Shannon brute force vs. selective search.

During the 1960s he worked on mathematics education in high schools by organizing courses and teaching methods.

He applied computing resources to the USSR planned economy and to cancer research. He served with Leonid Kantorovich and others on a cabinet ministry commission and oversaw the computation of the country's material expenditures to correct price formation. Kronrod's student V. D. Belkin further developed this work. At the Gertsen cancer research institute during the 1960s, with his student P. E. Kunin he studied the differential diagnostics of lung cancer and pneumonia to help doctors determine when surgery is needed.

In 1955, he first used an electronic computer at the Krzhizhanovskii laboratory of the Institute of Energy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, later called the Institute for Electronic Control Machines.

At the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEF or ITEP) during 1950–1955 Kronod collaborated with physicists, among them Isaak Pomeranchuk and Lev Landau. For providing theoretical physics with numerical solutions he received the Stalin Prize and an Order of the Red Banner.

In his last undergraduate year, Kronrod studied with Nikolai Luzin the teacher of many of the Soviet Union's finest scientists. Kronrod and Georgy Adelson-Velsky were colleagues and Luzin's last students. Like his teacher, Kronrod led a series of supplementary seminars for younger mathematics students. Unusually for the time, instead of students merely reporting on the content of courses, Kronrod made his students undertake training exercises, even proving basic theorems themselves. The preparation required for this reduced the numbers of participants, but those who remained, including R. A. Minlos and A. G. Vitushkin, derived great benefit. Vitushkin described him as "witty and friendly". At his own request, Kronrod was called simply "Sasha" by his students. He was considered to be a prophet in his field. The Kronod circle met between 1946 and 1953. Kronrod's position was formally at the Institute of Physics, which meant that his students had to register with other advisers, accounting for the decline of the circle into a series of friendly meetings. When he defended thesis in 1949, his committee including M. V. Keldish, A. N. Kolmogorov and D. E. Men'shov bypassed the Candidate of Sciences degree and awarded him a Doctor of Sciences degree in the physical-mathematical sciences.

During World War II he was rejected for military service because at the time graduate level students were exempt. They did help to build trenches around Moscow, and when he returned, Kronrod reapplied and was accepted. He served twice, and was injured twice. He was awarded several medals, including Order of the Red Star and Order of the Patriotic War. The second injury in 1943 hospitalised him for a year and he was discharged from the army in 1944. This injury made him an invalid of sorts for life.

Kronrod was born in Moscow. Growing up, he studied math with D. O. Shklyarsky in school and in 1938 entered the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University. He did his first independent mathematical work as a freshman with Professor A. O. Gel'fond. Kronrod was honored as a student with the first prize of the Moscow Mathematical Society and was the only person to win the prize twice.

Aleksandr (Alexander) Semenovich Kronrod (Russian: Алекса́ндр Семёнович Кронро́д) (October 22, 1921 – October 6, 1986) was a Soviet mathematician and computer scientist, best known for the Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formula which he published in 1964. Earlier, he worked on computational solutions of problems emerging in theoretical physics. He is also known for his contributions to economics, specifically for proposing corrections and calculating price formation for the USSR. Later, Kronrod gave his fortune and life to medicine to care for terminal cancer patients. Kronrod is remembered for his captivating personality and was admired as a student, teacher and leader.