Zinger, Vasily Yakovlevich

Vasily Zinger was born into the family of Yakov Khristianovich Zinger, the son of the hospital manager, and Anna Vasilyevna, nee Volkova, the daughter of a Moscow merchant ^{[3] [4]} . Yakov Khristianovich was a teacher of mathematics, earned his living in private lessons ^[5] . When Vasily was 11 years old, his father passed away, leaving a widow with three children (Vasily was the eldest of the children, and Nikolai, the future astronomer, the youngest) ^[6] . Even during his father’s life, Vasily began to live with his paternal grandfather, Christian Ivanovich Zinger ( German Zinger ), a German who moved from Germany to Moscow in the 18th century and for many years served as the housekeeper (manager) of the Golitsyn hospital (now the Golitsyn corps of the City Clinical Hospital No. 1 on Leninsky Prospekt ) and received the rank of a hereditary nobleman for good faith (it is known that during the Patriotic War of 1812 , when Napoleon’s troops occupied Moscow, he remained in the hospital alone and managed to prevent its destruction ablation, and also saved the hospital money left to him for storage). Christian Ivanovich was a Lutheran , but his children (all of them were already born in Moscow) and grandchildren were of the Orthodox faith and from birth belonged to the Russian nobility ^{[3] [4]} .

Education

Secondary education Vasily Zinger received at the First Moscow Gymnasium . Remembering later those years, Vasily Yakovlevich spoke of the educational system with complete disapproval, considering the teaching in the gymnasium formal and boring; by his own admission, he studied poorly in elementary grades and was not interested in anything. In the older classes, teaching improved, and from about 15 years old he began to study much better, impressing teachers with his excellent memory, quick thinking and independent thinking ^{[3] [6]} . He graduated from high school in 1853 with the right to enter the university without an exam ^[7] .

After high school, Zinger entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University . At first he studied there as a state-owned student and lived in a university boarding school , but later could not stand the conditions of such an existence and moved to his mother. It is known that Zinger earned private lessons in these years ^[6] . Among the professors of Zinger, two professors, mathematicians and mechanics, can be distinguished — Nikolai Dmitrievich Brashman (1796–1866), the author of one of the best analytic geometry courses for his time ^[8] , and August Yulievich Davidov ( 1823–1886 ), who during his studies Zinger was a professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and taught a course in probability theory and its applications ^[6] .

In the spring of 1857, Zinger graduated from Moscow University, a year later he was left at the university for two years of improvement in science, after which he was left for another year ^[6] .

In 1862, Zinger defended his master's thesis on “The Least Square Method”, in the same year he was elected by the Moscow University Council to the full-time position of assistant professor in the department of pure mathematics. In 1867 he defended his doctoral dissertation (topic "On the movement of free liquid mass") ^[5] .

Teaching

Zinger began his teaching career in 1862 by giving courses in mathematical physics and theory of light ^[9] and continued it through 1899 . Until 1871 he was an extraordinary professor , then an ordinary professor, and since 1888 - an honored professor of pure mathematics ^[5] .

Over the years, Zinger delivered lecture courses in many areas of mathematics: differential calculus , higher algebra , analytic geometry , and theoretical mechanics . Zinger himself singled out a course in projective geometry (“synthetic” or “new” geometry): it was he who introduced this branch of mathematics at the university as an independent subject. Zinger's lectures were original, visual, carefully thought out, they were well remembered, always attracted a large number of listeners ^[6] .

An interesting observation made by Nikolai Egorovich Zhukovsky (1847-1921), the future "father of Russian aviation", while studying at Moscow University (1864-1868). Lectures on mechanics during this period were given simultaneously by Vasily Yakovlevich Zinger and professor Fedor Alekseevich Sludsky (1841-1897); Zinger’s teaching of the subject was visual, geometrically clear, while the presentation of the material by Sludsky was exclusively abstract, occurred only in the language of formulas, without any geometric illustrations. Zhukovsky greatly appreciated both teachers, but, becoming a teacher himself, he always remained a follower of precisely the visual method of Zinger ^[10] . In his speech in April 1908 at an evening dedicated to the memory of Vasily Yakovlevich, he said: “With his love for figurative geometric thinking, Zinger fascinated young mechanics, directing their works along the path that the great geometers Newton , Poinsot , Poncelet , Shawl followed” ^[6] .

In 1888, Zinger translated into Russian the work of the French geometer Michel Challe (1793-1880), A Historical Review of the Origin of Geometric Methods. The ideas of Chall, as well as the German geometer Jacob Steiner (1796-1863), Zinger developed in his lectures ^[6] .

Zinger created a scientific school of Moscow scientists-geometers. It can include both Konstantin Alekseevich Andreev (1848-1921) and Aleksei Konstantinovich Vlasov (1868-1922), engaged in projective geometry , as well as scientists in the field of differential geometry Boleslav Kornelievich Mlodzievsky (1858-1923) and Dmitry Fedorovich Yegorov (1869-1931) ) ^[6] .

The grace of presentation and the depth of scientific ideas attracted many students to Zinger ... One of the most significant features of Zinger's lectures was that he attracted the attention of his listeners ... to guiding ideas and made them clearly grasp the difference between the inner meaning of each question or method and those established ... methods and transformations that make up the outer shell of pure speculation.

- From an article dedicated to V. Ya. Zinger, in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron ^[5]

Scientific and organizational activities

At the same time as a teacher, Zinger was elected to various posts: from 1870 to 1876 he was elected three times the secretary of the faculty ^[6] , from 1870 to 1876 he was also a member of the university court ^[5] . From June 1876 to February 1878, Zinger was the dean of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics . From February 1878 to March 1880, he was appointed vice-rector of Moscow University, but resigned in March 1880. In June 1880, Zinger was again elected dean of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and remained in this position until October 1885 ^[6] . The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary states that Zinger was “throughout his university career one of the most respected members of the professorial college” ^[5] .

In March 1892, having already stopped his activities at the university for health reasons, Zinger became the director of the Alexander Commercial School - this was the last position he held. Vasily Yakovlevich planned to create a new school textbook on geometry, but this idea remained unrealized, as did some of his other plans related to the school. In 1898, Zinger resigned ^{[5] [6]} .

Vasily Yakovlevich spent his entire youth in Moscow, far from nature (according to his own stories, he hardly distinguished rye from oats ), but after he married and began spending his free time in his wife’s estate in the village of Melekhovka, Tula province (now Yasnogorsky district of the Tula region ), he became interested in botany; in the first place, by his own admission, this was facilitated by joint walks and conversations with Nikolai Nikolaevich Kaufman (1834–1870), professor of botany at Moscow University, and author of the famous identifier “Moscow Flora”. Alexander Vasilievich , the son of Vasily Yakovlevich, later quoted his father: “When I watched Kaufman collect and examine the plants, when I listened to his stories, my eyes opened exactly: both grass, forest, and soil appeared to me in a completely new light. full of the deepest interest ” ^[11] .

Gradually, this hobby grew into serious scientific studies. In 1877, Zinger, together with botanist Dmitry Alexandrovich Kozhevnikov (1858-1882), began a systematic study of the flora of the Tula province. The result of these works was the "Essay on the Flora of the Tula Province" (1880) ^[9] .

In July 1882, Zinger and botanist Dmitry Ivanovich Litvinov (1854-1929, the future curator of the Botanical Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences for more than thirty years) explored the tract Galichya Gora - limestone cliffs on the right bank of the Don River (now this territory is in the Zadonsky district of Lipetsk areas ). According to the recollections of a local forester, Zinger and Litvinov were going to stay here for only half a day, but what they saw changed their plans, and they lingered. It follows from Litvinov’s diary that he and Zinger carefully examined the mountain, and “... a few days later, on the way back, we ... again went around [the mountain] and then drove down the Don. We took with us far from everything, but the most interesting. Zinger recorded the rest ... In the following years, Zinger and I visited the mountain several times, at different times of the year. ” They discovered plants that are uncharacteristic of the East European Plain , including 17 species that were previously known only from finds in the subalpine and alpine zones of the Mediterranean , the Caucasus , Altai and Siberia , among them Podolsky shoverekia , Don cinquefoil , steppe bone , and alyssum Gmelin , two-spikeled conifer , crescent scapular , silky wormwood and Armenian wormwood , Altai bell , Siberian croup, narrow-leaved saltwort , whole -leaved clematis ^[12] . The studies conducted by Zinger and Litvinov on Mount Galichy were continued by other scientists (among whom was Vasily Zinger’s son, Nikolai Vasilievich Zinger ^[13] ), who showed that this place belongs to the north-Don region of relict vegetation that has been preserved from the preglacial era. In 1925, the Galichia Gora Nature Reserve was organized here ^[14] .

Another botanist with whom Vasily Yakovlevich maintained relations is Rudolf Ernestovich Trautfetter (1809–1889), professor at the University of Dorpat ; Zinger considered him one of the best experts on the Russian flora ^[4] .

In total, Zinger wrote five botanical works, including the extensive “Collection of Information on the Flora of Central Russia” published in 1885 in the Scientific Notes of Moscow University. This work, on which Zinger worked for eight years, summarizes information on the flora of fifteen provinces , provides a list of 1749 plant species with an indication of their distribution. To organize the collection of information, Zinger applied an innovative technique, actively corresponding with a large number of nature lovers in the field and receiving extensive herbar materials from them ^{[6] [9]} . “There is no need to be a specialist in order to successfully and profitably study the domestic flora; this requires that love of work and hunting, which turns the considerable and not always easy labor of collecting and identifying plants into a habitual favorite occupation and little by little makes an experienced connoisseur out of a simple lover ... - he later wrote in the preface to his “Collection of information ...” . “There can be no good guidelines on local flora unless, with the help of the same amateur labor, the factual material necessary for this is collected” ^[15] .

Herbarium V. Ya. Zinger, partially collected by him personally, and for the most part made up of collections of numerous correspondents, served as documentary material not only for himself for the “Collection of Information on the Flora of Central Russia”, but also for other botanists - including Petr Feliksovich Mayevsky ( 1851-1892) for the compilation of the first edition of his Flora of Central Russia (1892). Now this herbarium is kept in the Department of Eastern Europe in the Herbarium of Moscow University .

Subsequently, Zinger was awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of Botany: the title was awarded to him by the University of Dorpat . This is a rare case when one person was awarded such a high scientific degree in such close sciences as mathematics and botany ^[11] .

At the end of 1898, Zinger settled on his estate in the Tula province and devoted most of the remaining years of his life to the study of plants ^[5] .

In honor of V. Ya. Zinger

In 1946, the genus of cereals Zingeria PASmirn was named in honor of Vasily Yakovlevich Zinger . - Tsingeria ^[16] . The genus is interesting in that one of its representatives, Bieberstein's cingeria ( Zingeria biebersteiniana ), has an extremely low number of chromosomes (2n = 4): this is the smallest number of chromosomes that occurs in higher plants - only a few of these species are known all over the world ^{[17 ]} .

In honor of V. Ya. Zinger, a species of plants from the genus Astragalus is also named - Astragalus zingeri Korsh. , 1890 ( Astragalus Zinger ), - endemic of the Volga region ; a rare species listed in the Red Book of Russia ^[18] .

Vasily Yakovlevich Zinger was one of the organizers of the Moscow Mathematical Society . It arose in September 1864 as a scientific circle of mathematics teachers (mostly from Moscow University), united around Professor Nikolai Dmitrievich Brashman . The initial goal of society was to acquaint each other through original essays with new works in various fields of mathematics and related sciences - both by our own and other scientists; but already in January 1866, when a request was made for the approval of the Society, its charter contained a substantially more ambitious goal: “The Moscow Mathematical Society is established with the aim of promoting the development of mathematical sciences in Russia.” The Society was officially approved in January 1867 ^[19] .

From the very beginning, Zinger took over the duties of secretary and kept the minutes of meetings, Brashman was elected the first president of the society, and vice-president was August Yulievich Davidov . After the death of Brashman, which followed in 1866, Davidov was elected president (since the Society was officially approved only in 1867, sometimes not Brashman, but Davidov is indicated in the literature as the first president ^[20] ), Zinger is vice president of the Society. In 1886, after the death of Davidov, Vasily Yakovlevich Zinger became president of the Society; he held this post until 1891, after which he asked to resign for health reasons ^{[6] [19]} .

To publish the reports read at the meetings, the journal " Mathematical Collection " was organized, its first issue was published in 1866; many of Zinger’s important works were published in it ^[19] . Four years after the death of Zinger, in 1911, the 28th volume of the "Mathematical Collection" was published, the first issue of which was dedicated to the memory of V. Ya. Zinger; five articles were published in the journal about the writings of Vasily Yakovlevich in the field of mathematics, mechanics, philosophy and botany, as well as about his life and activity in general ^[21] .

Vasily Zinger is one of the earliest representatives of those figures of Russian philosophical thought in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries , who are collectively known as the Moscow Philosophical and Mathematical School. This trend in philosophy arose on the basis of the Moscow Mathematical Society and was most clearly manifested in the works of Zinger’s colleagues at Moscow University — professors Nikolai Vasilyevich Bugaev (1837–1903) and Pavel Alekseevich Nekrasov (1853–1924) ^[3] .

The ideas of the Moscow philosophical and mathematical school were aimed at resolving the classical sociological antagonisms "individual - society" and "freedom - necessity" with the help of other grounds than in positivist and materialistic sociology , namely with the help of arrhythmology (theory of discontinuous functions and sets) and theory probabilities , as well as a special personalistic social anthropology , in which a person was considered (according to Bugaev) as a living spiritual unit, “an independent and amateur individual” ^[22] .

Zinger is the author of several public speeches of a scientific and philosophical content, about which the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary says that they “are equally remarkable by the depth of scientific foundations, the strictly logical construction of the arguments and the sincerity of the author’s confession of the convictions” ^[5] . Zinger was a supporter of the ideas of Immanuel Kant , whose work he studied in the original ^[6] .

With the speech “Exact Sciences and Positivism, ” Zinger spoke at the ceremonial act of Moscow University in 1874. In 1875, he gave a lecture at the Polytechnic Museum "On the relation of mathematical knowledge to the experimental and philosophical sciences" ^[6] .

In another work, “Misunderstandings on the foundations of geometry,” Zinger analyzes the views of various scientists on the foundations of geometry and expresses the view that the reliability, certainty, and accuracy of these foundations cannot be shown if based on empiricism , that is, to recognize sensory experience as the only source of knowledge. Empiricism, according to Zinger, can more likely destroy these foundations, since they have an ideal, a priori character, independent of experience, representing, in a sense, the inherent qualities of the human ability to contemplate ^[3] . In 1894, Zinger made this work at the IX Congress of Russian Naturalists and Doctors ^[5] .

Analysis with its continuous functions as a means of struggle against revolutionary theories

Under Soviet rule, this philosophical school in connection with the so-called “ Case of the Industrial Party ” (1930) and the defeat of scientific statistics (the first “wave” after the demographic catastrophe caused by the famine of 1932-1933, the second “wave” after the “incorrect” census of 1937 years) was declared reactionary. Here is what, for example, was written in the brochure “On the struggle for dialectical mathematics” published in 1931: “This school of Zinger, Bugaev , Nekrasov put mathematics at the service of the most reactionary“ scientific and philosophical world outlook ”, namely: analysis with its continuous functions as a means of struggle against revolutionary theories; arrhythmology, affirming the triumph of individuality and cabalism; probability theory as a theory of causeless phenomena and features; and everything as a whole is in brilliant accordance with the principles of the Black-Hundred philosophy of Lopatin - Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality. ” An article published in 1938, “Soviet Mathematics for 20 Years,” spoke of “the negative significance for the development of science of reactionary philosophical and political trends in Moscow mathematics (Bugaev, P. Nekrasov, etc.)” ^[23] . In subsequent years, the ideas of the Moscow philosophical and mathematical school were practically not mentioned in Soviet literature ^[3] . It is characteristic that in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron there is an extensive article about V. Ya. Zinger, while in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia there is no article about him at all.

At the end of the 20th century, scientists again began to show significant interest in the ideas of the school of N. V. Bugaev; This is due, among other things, to the fact that many of the ideas of this school, as it now becomes clear, were further developed, and the representatives of this school were among the founders of a systematic approach in the natural sciences ^[3] .

The experimental data themselves, due to the inevitable lack of accuracy, are so malleable that they can always be adapted to non-Euclidean and any other geometry, and from this it is even more clearly found that the reliability of axioms can neither be confirmed nor disproved through experimental verification .

- Zinger V. Ya. Misunderstandings in the views on the foundations of geometry ^[3]

The works of Vasily Yakovlevich Zinger belong to different fields of physical and mathematical knowledge: this is pure mathematics , and applied mathematics , and mechanics (including celestial mechanics ), and hydrodynamics ^[6] . Among them ^[5] :

• Least squares method. - M .: 1862.
• About the relative motion of an abandoned point // Matematicheskii Sbornik : Journal. - M. , 1866. - T. 1 , No. 1 . - S. 163-172 .
• On the motion of free liquid mass // Matematicheskii Sbornik: Journal. - M. , 1867. - T. 2 , No. 3 . - S. 155-188 .
• Construction of a third-order curve at nine given points. - 1868.
• On the main theorem of higher geometry // Mathematical collection: journal. - M. , 1869. - T. 4 , No. 1 . - S. 23-26 .
• Rotational motion of a liquid ellipsoid with a change in form // Matematicheskii Sbornik: Journal. - M. , 1872. - T. 5 , No. 4 . - S. 414-419 .
• About one case of fluid equilibrium // Mathematical collection: journal. - M. , 1873. - T. 6 , No. 3 . - S. 265—273 .
• Higher Algebra. - M .: 1874.
• On the geometric meaning of inequalities // Mathematical collection: journal. - M. , 1875. - T. 7 , No. 3 . - S. 408-418 .
• About one case minimum . - 1891.
• Elementary theory of elliptical planetary motion. - 1891.
• To the question of the point of least distance // Mathematical collection: journal. - M. , 1892. - T. 16 , No. 2 . - S. 317—341 .

Some of Zinger's Botanical Works

• Kozhevnikov D.A. , Zinger V. Ya. Essay on the flora of the Tula province // Transactions of St. Petersburg Society of Natural History. - St. Petersburg, 1880. - T. 2 , No. 1 .
• Zinger V. Ya. Collection of information on the flora of Central Russia . - M .: University Printing House (M. Katkov), 1885.

Philosophical work

• Exact sciences and positivism. - M., 1874.
• On the relation of mathematical knowledge to the sciences experienced and philosophical. - 1875.
• Misunderstandings on the foundations of geometry. - M., 1884.

Science and true knowledge should not be slaves of experience, they should dominate it and make it serve its tasks. It is true that science should be guided not by material, but by ideal aspirations, but more truly, that it is based not on material, but on ideal principles. The highest qualities of science are clarity, simplicity, sincerity and conscientiousness of thought; the light of science is the ideal of truth. But science is only one of the sides of spiritual being and human life; the same ideal of truth appears on other sides, either as the ideal of beauty and harmony, then as the ideal of good and honor, truth and humanity; it’s one and the same ideal - the one before which we all, without distinction of ages and positions, without distinction of views and beliefs, without distinction of merit and talents, reverently worship, as before the ideal of divine wisdom and love! "

- Zinger V. Ya. Misunderstandings in the views on the foundations of geometry ^[3]

Vasily Yakovlevich was married three times. His first wife is Magdalena Ivanovna Raevskaya ^[3] , the sister of Ivan Ivanovich Raevsky (1835–1891), a landowner , public and zemstvo leader and close friend of Leo Tolstoy ^[24] . Zinger and Raevskaya got married in 1865 ^[3] . It is known that their family life evolved very happily ^[9] .

Their sons, like their father, became prominent scientists, while, like Vasily Yakovlevich, they were engaged in botany - the eldest son professionally, and the youngest as an amateur. The eldest son, Nikolai (1865-1923), was a systematic botanist, professor at the Novo-Alexandria Institute of Agriculture and Forestry (now - VV Dokuchaev Kharkov State Agrarian University ); winner of the Lenin Prize for 1928 (posthumous) ^[9] . Another son, Alexander (1870-1934), was a physicist, teacher; known as the author of many textbooks and teaching aids in physics (for example, the textbook “Primary Physics”, which for a long time was the main textbook in the school on its subject and was reprinted 20 times from 1919 to 1931); he also owns the book "Entertaining Botany", published in 1927 and since then reprinted many times ^[9] . It is interesting that when working on his “Entertaining Botany”, Alexander Vasilievich actively used Mayevsky’s Flora of Central Russia ^[25] , a book largely based on the collection of information about the flora of Central Russia by Vasily Yakovlevich ^[15] .

It is also known about the daughter of Vasily Yakovlevich, Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in the marriage of Rizkina. Sofya Andreyevna Tolstaya , the wife of Leo Tolstoy, in one of her letters to her husband reports that Elizaveta Vasilyevna came to visit her with two sons. In her diary for 1910, Tolstoy writes about her like this: “She is not stupid and educated, but alien to her materialism and scholarship” ^[26] .

In 1888, Magdalene Ivanovna suddenly died ^[3] .

Soon Vasily Yakovlevich married Ekaterina Alekseevna Letnikova, the daughter of Alexei Vasilyevich Letnikov, professor at the Imperial Moscow Technical School (1837-1888), with whom Zinger was once very friendly.

Vasily Yakovlevich had several children from his second marriage ^[3] , among them:

• Alexei (1892-1945), Russian naval officer, professor of marine astronomy , who lived in exile in France after the Civil War .
• Natalia (1897-1977), professor of botany.
• Vera (1900-1993), wife of academician Yevgeny Alekseevich Chudakov and mother of academician Alexander Yevgenyevich Chudakov .

Ekaterina Alekseevna suffered from a heart defect , often was ill and died in 1903.

Shortly before his death, Zinger married for the third time and again began to live in Moscow, raising his young children.

At the end of the winter of 1907, Zinger fell ill with pneumonia and died on February 16 (March 1, according to the new style ^[1] ).

The funeral service was held at the University Church on Mokhovaya (Zinger was an Orthodox religion ).

Vasily Yakovlevich Zinger was buried at the Vagankovsky cemetery in Moscow ^[6] (plot 10; that corner of the plot, which is closer to the Church of the Resurrection of the Slovuschey ).

Not an abundance of scholarly works, Professor Zinger gained his fame, but the nature of these works. Everything that he wrote, with a depth of content, was distinguished by clarity, completeness and concreteness of form. There are mathematical works that, once read, are remembered forever, just like the picture of a famous artist, briefly seen in an art gallery, is clearly then drawn in the imagination. The works of V. Ya. Zinger belong to this kind of work ... His students, both mathematicians and mechanics, tried to work in this direction ... We honor the memory of the mathematician, who can rightly be called the head of the Russian geometric school.

- From a speech by Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky at an evening in memory of Zinger in April 1908 ^{[6] [9]}

It is known that in the 1860s Vasily Yakovlevich Zinger lived in Moscow in Maly Kozikhinsky Lane and in the house of the Streshnevs in Kamergersky Lane , ^[28] and in the early 1890s on Malaya Bronnaya Street ^[29] .

• Zinger, Vasily Yakovlevich // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : in 86 volumes (82 volumes and 4 additional). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Levshin L.V. Deans of the Faculty of Physics, Moscow University . - M .: Faculty of Physics, Moscow State University, 2002. - 272 p. - 500 copies. - ISBN 5-8279-0025-5 . Archived on April 18, 2011. Archived April 18, 2011 on Wayback Machine (Retrieved August 20, 2010)
• Godin A.E. Development of the ideas of the Moscow philosophical and mathematical school . - Second edition, extended. - M .: Red Light, 2006 .-- 379 p. - ISBN 5-902967-05-8 . (Retrieved August 20, 2010)
• Nekrasov P.A. Moscow School of Philosophy and Mathematics and its founders // Mathematical collection: journal. - M. , 1904. - T. 25 , No. 1 . - S. 3-249 . (Retrieved August 20, 2010)

• List of publications by V. Ya. Zinger in the Math-Net.Ru database (Retrieved October 15, 2009)
• Tsinger Vasily Yakovlevich (neopr.) . Chronicle of Moscow University . Date of treatment December 4, 2017.
• Professors of mathematics at Moscow University on the website of Moscow State University (Retrieved October 11, 2009)