Victor Mikhailovich Glushkov (Russian: Виктор Миха́йлович Глушко́в; August 24, 1923 – January 30, 1982) was a Soviet computer scientist. He is considered to be the founding father of information technology in the Soviet Union and one of the founding fathers of Soviet cybernetics.
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Biography
He was born in Rostov-on-Don, Russian SFSR, in the family of a mining engineer. Glushkov graduated from Rostov State University in 1948, and in 1952 proposed solutions to Hilbert's fifth problem and defended his thesis at Moscow State University.
In 1956, he began working with computers and worked in Kiev as a Director of the Computational Center of the Academy of Science of Ukraine. In 1958, he became a member of the Communist Party. In 1962, Glushkov established the famous Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine and became its first director.
He made contributions to the theory of automata. He and his followers (Kapitonova, Letichevskiy and others) successfully applied that theory to enhance construction of computers. His book on that topic Synthesis of Digital Automata became well known. For that work, he was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1964 and elected as a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
He greatly influenced many other fields of theoretical computer science (including the theory of programming and artificial intelligence) as well as its applications in the Soviet Union. He published nearly 800 printed works.