1923–1982
Viktor Hlushkov
Cybernetician behind the MIR computers
Could a network of computers help plan a whole country’s economy? Viktor Hlushkov, a mathematician from Rostov-on-Don, proposed such a system. He worked in Kyiv for 26 years, led the Institute of Cybernetics and oversaw the building of the Dnepr and MIR computers.
Key accomplishments
- Solved the generalized fifth Hilbert problem
- Director of the Computing Center (from 1957) and of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1962–1982), which now bears his name
- The Dnepr and MIR computers were built under his leadership
- A general theory of digital automata
- The first automated control system, Lviv
- Editor in chief of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Cybernetics
A mathematician from Rostov
Viktor Hlushkov was born in 1923 in Rostov-on-Don (now in russia). He graduated from Rostov University in 1948 and spent eight years teaching at a forestry institute in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). He first made his name as a mathematician by solving the generalized fifth Hilbert problem, one of the famous puzzles of higher algebra.
Kyiv and its computers
In 1956 Hlushkov moved to Kyiv to head the computing laboratory of the Institute of Mathematics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The next year he became director of the Computing Center, which in 1962 grew into the Institute of Cybernetics. The same year he was elected vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Under his leadership Kyiv engineers designed the Dnepr and MIR computers. Hlushkov also created a general theory of digital automata, widely used in building computers and automatic machines.
Computers for a whole country
Hlushkov also worked on applying cybernetics to economics and management. With his students he developed the first automated control system, called Lviv. He was the first to propose a radically new system of economic planning with computers, and he worked on a national network of computing centers. Many of his methods were used across the Soviet bloc.
Hlushkov died in Moscow in 1982 and was buried in Kyiv, at the Baikove Cemetery.
Why it matters today
Viktor Hlushkov made Kyiv a city where computers were built, along with the theory used to design them. He saw computers not just as calculating machines but as a way to run a whole country’s economy, and he was the first to propose such a planning system. His Computing Center grew into the Institute of Cybernetics, and the world’s first Encyclopedia of Cybernetics came out in Kyiv, in Ukrainian too. It shows that new fields of science can be born in Kyiv when someone sets out to build them. Anyone building tech in Ukraine today can draw on that Kyiv tradition.
