Aleksey Krylov

Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov (; – October 26, 1945) was a Russian naval engineer, applied mathematician and memoirist. Biography Aleksey Nikolayevich Krylov was born on August 3 O.S., 1863 in Visyaga village near the town of Alatyr, Simbirsk Governorate, Russian Empire (today Krylovo, Chuvashia) to the family of a retired artillery officer. His father, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krylov (1830-1911), was the local landlord and vice-Marshal of Nobility, but had relatively liberal views and later led the zemskaya uprava (the Executive Board of the Zemstvo self-government system) in Alatyr. His mother, née Sofya Viktorovna Lyapunova, was a member of the distinguished Lyapunov family (the mathematician Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov and musician Sergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov were his second cousins). In 1878 Krylov entered the Naval College (rus. Морское училище) and graduated with distinction in 1884. There he did his first scientific work with Ivan de Collong on Deviation of magnetic compasses. The theory of magnetic and gyro-compasses fascinated him for all of his life; later he published important works related to the dynamics of the magnetic compass and proposed the dromoscope, a device that would automatically calculate the deviation of a compass. He also was a pioneer of the gyrocompass, being the first to create a full theory of it. After spending several years at the Main Hydrographic Administration and at a shipbuilding plant (French-Russian shipbuilding company), in 1888 he continued his study in the Naval Academy of Saint Petersburg. He was a talented and promising student and after graduating ahead-of-schedule from the Academy in 1890, stayed on as mathematics and ship-theory lecturer.