Mikhail Lomonosov (19.11 (08.11. O.S.) 1835 - 15.04.(04.04. O.S.) 1765) - Russian poet and scientist.
Lomonosov was the son of a poor fisherman. At the age of 10 he too took up that line of work. When the few books he was able to obtain could no longer satisfy his growing thirst for knowledge, in December 1730, he left his native village, penniless and on foot, for Moscow. His ambition was to educate himself to join the learned men on whom the tsar Peter I the Great was calling to transform Russia into a modern nation.
The clergy and the nobility, attached to their privileges and fearing the spread of education and science, actively opposed the reforms of which Lomonosov was a lifelong champion. His bitter struggle began as soon as he arrived in Moscow. In order to be admitted to the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy he had to conceal his humble origin; the sons of nobles jeered at him, and he had scarcely enough money for food and clothes. But his robust health and exceptional intelligence enabled him in five years to assimilate the eight-year course of study; during this time he taught himself Greek and read the philosophical works of antiquity.
Noticed at last by his instructors, in January 1736 Lomonosov became a student at the St. Petersburg Academy. Seven months later he left for Germany to study at the University of Marburg, where he led the turbulent life of the German student. His work did not suffer, however, for within three years he had surveyed the main achievements of Western philosophy and science. His mind, freed from all preconception, rebelled at the narrowness of the empiricism in which the disciples of Isaac Newton had bound the natural sciences; in dissertations sent to St. Petersburg, he attacked the problem of the structure of matter.
In 1739, in Freiberg, Lomonosov studied firsthand the technologies of mining, metallurgy, and glassmaking. Also friendly with the poets of the time, he freely indulged the love of verse that had arisen during his childhood with the reading of Psalms. The "Ode," dedicated to the Empress, and the Pismo o pravilakh rossiyskogo stikhotvorstva ("Letter Concerning the Rules of Russian Versification") made a considerable impression at court.
After breaking with one of his masters, the chemist Johann Henckel, and many other mishaps, among which his marriage at Marburg must be included, Lomonosov returned in July 1741 to St. Petersburg. The Academy, which was directed by foreigners and incompetent nobles, gave the young scholar no precise assignment, and the injustice aroused him. His violent temper and great strength sometimes led him to go beyond the rules of propriety, and in May 1743 he was placed under arrest. Two odes sent to the empress Elizabeth won him his liberation in January 1744, as well as a certain poetic prestige at the Academy.
While in prison he worked out the plan of work that he had already developed in Marburg. The 276 zametok po fizike i korpuskulyarnoy filosofi ("276 Notes on Corpuscular Philosophy and Physics") set forth the dominant ideas of his scientific work. Appointed a professor by the Academy in 1745, he translated Christian Wolff's Institutiones philosophiae experimentalis ("Studies in Experimental Philosophy") into Russian and wrote, in Latin, important works on the Meditationes de Caloris et Frigoris Causa (1747; "Cause of Heat and Cold"), the Tentamen Theoriae de vi Aлris Elastica (1748; "Elastic Force of Air"), and the Theoria Electricitatis (1756; "Theory of Electricity"). His friend, the celebrated German mathematician Leonhard Euler, recognized the creative originality of his articles, which were, on Euler's advice, published by the Russian Academy in the Novye kommentari.
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