Birth of Ervand Kogbetliantz (February 21, 1888)

His is not a household name, but Ervand Kogbetliantz was an accomplished mathematician and inventor who lived and taught in the United States from the 1940s-1960s.

Ervand George Kogbetliantz was born on February 21, 1888, in the old Armenian community of Nor Nakhichevan (Novo Nakhichevan), in the Northern Caucasus, now part of Rostov-on-the-Don (Russia). We do not know anything about his early years, but it appears that love for mathematics came to him naturally. He studied mathematics at the University of Paris (1907) and graduated from the School of Mathematics at Moscow University (1912), where he taught from 1912-1918. In 1918 he invented one of the oldest forms of three-dimensional chess. He returned to the Northern Caucasus, and taught at the Polytechnic Institute of Ekaterinodar (nowadays Krasnodar) from 1918-1920.

It appears that the newly-opened University of Yerevan, in the fledgling Republic of Armenia, attracted him, and he taught there for a few months. A couple of weeks after Armenia became a Soviet republic, on December 17, 1920, Commissar of Education Ashot Hovhannisian issued a decree about the restructuring of the university, and established an advisory committee presided by Kogbetliantz, which was entrusted with the task.

In 1921 Kogbetliantz left Armenia for France. He obtained a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Paris in 1923. He taught at the Russian High School of Paris in the 1920s and was president of the Union of Geophysicists from 1927-1933.

Kogbetliantz received an invitation from Reza Shah to organize the chairs of mathematics and celestial mechanics at the University of Tehran in 1933, which he also directed until 1938. His efforts were rewarded with the Elmi Order, the highest of Iran.

In 1939 he returned to Paris as a researcher for the National Center of Scientific Research and kept that position until 1942. As many other scholars, he left occupied France and crossed the Atlantic. He taught mathematics at Lehigh University (1942-1944) and then at the New School of Social Research (1944-1954) and Columbia University (1946-1953). Meanwhile, he was a consultant for Standard Oil (1945-1946) and then for IBM (1953-1964). He became a member of the Rockefeller Institute in 1956. 

His mathematical work was mainly on integral equations, the theory of orthogonal polynomials, numerical analysis, gravity and magnetic theories, etcetera. He formulated an algorithm for singular value decomposition which bears his name. He authored close to one hundred scholarly articles and books, some of them in translation ( Fundamentals of Mathematics from an Advanced Viewpoint, 4 volumes, 1968; Handbook of First Complex Prime Numbers, 1971, with Alice Krikorian). He also invented precision devices to measure Earth magnetism, and various analogical and gyroscopic devices. Kogbetliantz was one of the co-creators of the IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, the first transistorized supercomputer created by IBM, which was on sale from 1961-1964.

In 1952 Kogbetliantz’s three-dimensional chess received much media attention, and was described in several articles in Time, Newsweek, New Yorker, and Life, including pictures of his chess set. At his death, he was working with world champion Bobby Fischer on a game of chess for three people. 

 

He retired in 1964 and moved back to Paris, where he passed away on November 5, 1974.

Birth of Alenoush Terian (November 9, 1920)

Alenoush Terian, known as the “mother of contemporary astronomy in Iran,” broke the glass ceiling many decades before the term “glass ceiling” was ever used in English.
She was born on November 9, 1920, in Tehran. Her mother had studied in Switzerland and was a French teacher, while her father, native of Nor Jugha, the Armenian suburb near Ispahan, was a writer and became the director of the Sepah Bank for the last twenty years of his life.

Alenoush Terian graduated in 1947 from the Faculty of Science of the University of Tehran and went to work in the physics laboratory of her alma mater. A year later, she was name head of operations of the laboratory.

She tried to convince her professor, Mahmoud Hesabi, to help her get a scholarship to pursue studies in France. However, she was rejected because she was a woman. This did not deter her from going to Paris with her father’s financial support. She studied at the Faculty of Atmospheric Physics of the Sorbonne and obtained a master’s degree in 1956. She was offered a teaching job there, but she rejected it with the aim of bringing her services to Iran. She returned and became an assistant professor of Thermodynamics at the Faculty of Physics in Tehran University.

The situation had changed by 1959, when Western Germany offered a scholarship to Tehran University for studies in the observatory of solar physics for four months. Alenoush Terian was selected for the scholarship and went to Germany in March 1961. After finishing her stint, she returned to Iran. In May 1964 she received the grade of full professor, and became the first female professor of Physics in Iran.

In 1966 she became a member of the Geophysics Committee of Tehran University. Three years later, she was named chairman of the study group of solar physics at the Geophysics Institute of the university and went to work at the solar observatory, which she had helped found. She retired in 1979.

She did not marry, but devoted her entire life to her students. As one former student stated, “She always said that she had a daughter called moon and a son called sun.”
The Iranian TV made a documentary on her life, “Towards the Sun,” in 2003. She was decorated in 2006 by Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.


Alenoush Terian passed away on March 4, 2011, after spending the last years of her life at a nursing home. In her will, she left her home to the Armenian community of Nor Jugha and to those students who do not have a proper living place.