Birth of Leo (April 26, 1860)

Leo was the pseudonym of an Armenian intellectual who produced an amazing output of historical and literary scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century.

Arakel Babakhanian was born on April 26, 1860, in the village of Karintak, near the town of Khankend (nowadays Stepanakert, the capital of Artsakh). In 1878 he graduated from the diocesan school of Shushi. This was the extent of his formal studies, which he would complement with self-teaching. After graduation, he worked in Shushi and Baku as a scribe for notary work, telegrapher, and manager of the “Aror” printing house. 

He was still a student when he started collaborating with the influential daily Mshak of Tiflis in 1877. His views were shaped by the ideological tenets maintained by Raffi, the novelist, and Grigor Artzruni, the founding editor of Mshak. Over the years, he would contribute to a number of publications from the Caucasus to Europe. Initially, he wrote commentary and prose (short story and novel). His most notable literary work was The Daughter of the Melik (1898). He even wrote a historical play, Vartanank, published in 1916.

In 1895 he moved to Tiflis, becoming secretary and contributing editor of Mshak until 1906 . Afterwards, he gradually shifted to scholarship and produced hundreds of articles and dozens of books. First he entered the field of literary criticism, with essays about many contemporary writers, and condensed his views in his monograph The Literary of Russian Armenians from the Beginnings to Our Days (1904). On the other hand, he offered fresh interpretations of many historical issues. He produced a spat of book of history: Armenian Printing (2 vols., 1901-1902), Catholicos Hovsep Arghoutian (1902), Grigor Artzruni (3 vols., 1902-1905), Saint Mesrop (1904), The Armenian Question (1906). After a year of teaching at the Gevorgian Seminary of Holy Etchmiatzin (1906-1907), Leo returned to Tiflis and dedicated himself to scholarship. He produced new books: The Feast of the Armenian Book (1912), The Kingdom of Van (1915), The Documents of the Armenian Question (1915), and the posthumously published Ani (1946). His most ambitious work, which remained unfinished, was the three-volume History of the Armenians, of which he only saw the first volume published in 1916 (the other two volumes were posthumously published in 1946 and 1947). This work of almost 2,000 pages introduced Armenian history from prehistory until the end of the eighteenth century (excluding the 12 ^th -15 ^th centuries). While his views were both fresh and sometimes not exempt of controversy, Leo’s works were characterized by an encyclopedic use of Armenian and foreign sources, archaeological, epigraphic, linguistic, and philological materials, travelogues and memoirs, secondary sources, et cetera.

In 1924 Leo moved to Yerevan by invitation of the government of Soviet Armenia and became a lecturer of Armenian history at Yerevan State University until his death. His classes became the first university textbooks of Armenian history, toge

ther with those of professional historian Hakob Manandian. He was given the title of professor in 1925 and became a full member of the Institute of Science and Art of Soviet Armenia (renamed Institute of Sciences in 1930).

While in his pre-Soviet writings Leo gave primacy to the role of the individual and spiritual and geographical factors, in the 1920s he tried to accommodate himself to the new ruling ideology and reversed many of his positions. The genocide appeared to have crushed his views. His work From the Past (1925) offered a picture of the Armenian liberation movement that was completely at odds with his positive approach of his formative years. He repeated his negative evaluation in the two-volume The Ideology of the Turkish Armenian Revolution (1934). In his work The Khoja Capital (1934) he regarded the commercial capital as the moving force of Armenian modern history. 

Leo passed away in Yerevan on November 14, 1932, and was buried in the Yerevan Pantheon. A street and a school in the Armenian capital have been named after him. Leo’s bust has been placed at the central building of Yerevan State University.

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.

Death of Manuk Abeghian - September 25, 1944

Manuk Abeghian was one of the most important scholars of Armenian Studies in the first half of the twentieth century. At the conclusion of his remarkable career, he became one of the founding members of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia in 1943.

Abeghian was born on March 17, 1865 in the village of Astapat, in the historical Armenian province of Nakhichevan (today in territory of Azerbaijan). He was the son of an agriculturist. After his initial studies in the school of the monastery of Karmir Vank, in 1876 he entered the Kevorkian Seminary of Etchmiadzin and graduated in 1885. He taught for many years in schools of Shushi (Karabagh) and Tiflis. In 1893 he went to Europe and became an auditor at the German universities of Jena, Leipzig, and Berlin, as well as in the University of Paris. In 1898 he was awarded his doctorate at the University of Jena, where he defended a dissertation on the ancient Armenian beliefs.

He returned to the Caucasus and was a teacher in his alma mater, the Kevorkian Seminary, until 1914. Then, he moved to Tiflis, where he taught at the Nersisian Lyceum until 1918.

He moved to Armenia in 1921 and became a professor at Yerevan State University; he also was the dean of the Faculty of History and Literature from 1923-1925. In 1935 he earned a second doctorate, this time in Armenian philology.

Abeghian was a foremost scholar in a variety of disciplines of Armenian Studies. He was a pioneering figure in the study of Armenian mythology. Besides recording several variants of the Armenian national epics David of Sassoun, he was the author of its first specialized study (1889). Together with his colleague Garo Melik-Ohanjanian, they both prepared a three-volume edition of all available variants of the epics (published between 1936 and 1951). Abeghian was also one of the authors of an integral version of the epics, which condensed all the variants into one single text (1939). He also published critical editions of Armenian popular songs and medieval poetry.

Among his major works was the two-volume History of Ancient Armenian Literature (1944-1945), which was left unfinished because of his death. Many of his studies were published in a collection of eight volumes between 1966 and 1985.

Abeghian’s name was linked to the reform of Armenian orthography in 1922. After the sovietization of Armenia, the new regime started a policy aimed at the simplification of Armenian orthography, whose ultimate purpose was to eliminate the Armenian alphabet and replace it with Latin script. In 1921, Abeghian presented his personal views as a report in a conference organized by the Commissariat (Ministry) of Education. The same report was used a year later by the Commissariat, without consulting with Abeghian, to decree, on March 4, 1922, the reform of the orthography. For this reason, it is common to call the reformed orthography with the name of “Abeghian spelling.” The excesses in this reform motivated a new change in the Soviet Armenian orthography—used today in Armenia, the former Soviet Union, and among the “new diaspora” formed after the migration of the past 25 years—in 1940, which made it closer to classical orthography (used today by the Diaspora, both speakers of Western Armenian and of Eastern Armenian, in the case of Iran).

Manuk Abeghian passed away in 1944. The Institute of Literature of the Armenian National of Academy carries his name.

Opening of Yerevan State University - January 31, 1920

On May 16, 1919, the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Armenia adopted a resolution to found a university in Yerevan. However, the lack of an adequate building forced the establishment of the University outside the capital. The opening ceremonies were held with great pomp on January 31, 1920, in the building of the Commerce School of Alexandropol (now Gumri). The first rector was a law scholar, Yuri Ghambarian (1850-1926).

The inauguration was attended by the leadership of the republic, as well as by many guests from abroad. The first class was a lecture by the famous Armenologist, Stepan Malkhasiants (1857-1947) on February 1, 1920. During its first year, the university had one school (Faculty of History and Linguistics), 262 students and 32 professors. Famous specialists who had graduated abroad and had extensive experience in teaching and scholarship were invited to teach, such as Hakob Manandian, Manuk Abeghian, Stepan Malkhasiants, and others.

The University was moved to Yerevan in June 1920, but the grave political situation of the country made it impossible to restart classes until the sovietization of Armenia in December 1920. Historian Ashot Hovhannisian, the Commissar of Education of Soviet Armenia, issued a decree on December 17, 1920, renaming the university the Popular University of Yerevan. Historian Hakob Manandian was elected rector. The Popular University had two sections, Social Sciences and Biology. In October 1921, it expanded to five sections (Natural Sciences, Oriental Studies, Technics, Pedagogy, and Soviet Construction). The Faculty of Natural Sciences turned into Faculty of Agronomy, while the Faculty of Medicine was opened in March 1922. The university was renamed Yerevan State University in 1923. It functioned initially on the first floor of the Teachers’ Seminar, a black tufa building on Astafian (now Abovian) Street. Other remarkable scholars became faculty members, among them linguists Hrachia Adjarian and Grigor Ghapantsian, historian Leo (Arakel Babakhanian), literary scholar Arsen Terterian, archaeologist Ashkharbek Kalantar, art scholar Bishop Gareguin Hovsepiants (future Catholicos of the Holy See of Cilicia), philologists Yervant Ter-Minasian, Bishop Mesrop Ter-Movsisian, and Karo Melik-Ohanjanian, and others. Now its central building is on the beginning of Alex Manoogian Street (formerly Mravian).

In the academic year 1933-1934, the university had five faculties: Economic Sciences, Natural Sciences, History and Literature, Physics and Mathematics, and Pedagogy. The latter became the ground for the Pedagogical Institute (now the Armenian State Pedagogical University “Khachatur Abovian”). In the same year, the Faculty of Natural Sciences branched out in Biology and Chemistry.

Many teachers were arrested and killed during the Stalin purges of 1936-1938, while others were exiled and lived for years outside Armenia. Some of them died, while others were able to return after the death of Stalin in precarious health.

The number of schools increased over the years. In 1935-1936 there were eight and in 1991 they had turned into seventeen. Yerevan State University made an important change in its educational programs in the academic year 1995-1996, when it adopted a three-level program: bachelor (4 years), master (2 years) and graduate (3 years).

The university has given about 90,000 graduates since its inception. Today it has about 13,000 students in its 22 branches. More than seven hundred of its 1,200 teachers have one or two doctorate degrees. More than thirty full members of the National Academy of Sciences currently have educational and scholarly functions at the university.