Scientific seminar “On the contribution of mathematicians to the Atomic Project of the USSR”

15 February at 12:00 MSK

The contribution of physicists to the creation of the nuclear shield of our country is now well known. But the contribution of mathematicians in the historical-mathematical literature has received much less attention. After the declassification of several documents relating to the USSR Atomic Project and the publication of the memoirs of scientists participating in it, it became possible to fill this gap.

The difficulties faced by the creators of nuclear weapons were exacerbated by extremely limited information about the physical nature of the phenomena that accompany the course of nuclear processes. An important method for understanding the features of a nuclear explosion was its mathematical modeling followed by calculations based on the constructed physical-mathematical models. In the course of the work, the models were improved, and the calculation methods were also improved.

The construction of these models was carried out jointly by physicists (L.D. Landau, I.I. Tamm, Yu.B. Khariton, Ya. B. Zeldovich, A.D. Sakharov, etc.) and mathematicians (S.L. Sobolev, A. N. Tikhonov, N. N. Bogolyubov, K. A. Semendyaev, etc.).  The resulting models, including differential, integral, and other operators, were discretized and sent to the computational groups of calculators. These groups were created in the late 1940s in MIAS (Head - Academician I.G. Petrovsky, later - Academician M.V. Keldysh), Leningrad branch of MIAS (Head - Professor L.V. Kantorovich), Geophysical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Head - Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR A .N. Tikhonov) and in the early 1950s in Arzamas-16 (supervisor - Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences N.N. Bogolyubov). The duties of pointed groups included the construction of a theoretical justification for approximate methods for solving linear and nonlinear difference equations.