by Vladislav RUTKOVSKY, Dr. Sc. (Tech.), Laboratory Head of the Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow) In March of 2013 the scientific community of our country will mark the centennial birth anniversary of the outstanding scientist in the field of automatic control Boris Petrov (1913-1980), Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1979-1980), Hero of Socialist Labor (1969), winner of Lenin (1966) and State prizes (1972). Working in close creative cooperation with leaders of the national rocket-and-space science and technology, such as Sergei Korolev, Valentin Glushko, Mikhail Yangel, Vladimir Chelomey, Vladimir Utkin, Mikhail Reshetnyov, Vasily Mishin, Boris Chertok and Nikolai Pilyugin, he joined by rights a cohort of founders of national astronautics and was one of the organizers of international cooperation in near-Earth space. Petrov's activity received wide recognition in the world. He was a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, foreign member of Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Polish academies of sciences, was awarded a number of foreign orders and a gold medal of the National Space Research Center of France. Petrov was born on March 11, 1913, in Smolensk. His mother was a physician who devoted all her efforts to control of the typhoid epidemy broken out soon after the October Revolution of 1917 and died when her son was 6 years old. In 1929 died his father, and Petrov's relatives took care of him and his younger sister. He left school in February of 1930, was a bookkeeper in a collective farm for some time and in autumn of that year left for Moscow where he entered a factory school стр. 50 attached to Ordzhonikidze Machine-Tool Construction Plant and acquired a profession of lathe operator. However, he was eager to study. Yet as a boy, he preferred reading to children's games, he liked books on travels and adventures and was carried away by drawing. ... Читать далее