Aleksandr Kronrod

Soviet mathematician and computer scientist

Aleksandr Semyonovich Kronrod (Алекса́ндр Семёнович Кронро́д; October 22, 1921 – October 6, 1986) was a Soviet mathematician and computer scientist, best known for the Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formula which he published in 1964. Earlier, he worked on computational solutions of problems emerging in theoretical physics. He is also known for his contributions to economics, specifically for proposing corrections and calculating price formation for the USSR. Later, Kronrod gave his fortune and life to medicine to care for terminal cancer patients. Kronrod is remembered for his captivating personality and was admired as a student, teacher and leader. He is the author of several well known books, including "Nodes and weights of quadrature formulas. Sixteen place tables" and "Conversations on Programming". A biographer wrote Kronrod gave ideas "away left and right, quite honestly being convinced that the authorship belongs to the one who implements them."

Kronrod was born in Moscow. Growing up, he studied math with D. O. Shklyarsky in school and in 1938 entered the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University. He did his first independent mathematical work as a freshman with Professor Alexander Gelfond. Kronrod was honored as a student with the first prize of the Moscow Mathematical Society and was the only person to win the prize twice. During World War II he was rejected for military service because at the time graduate level students were exempt. They did help to build trenches around Moscow, and when he returned, Kronrod reapplied and was accepted. He served twice, and was injured twice. He was awarded several medals, including Order of the Red Star. The second injury in 1943 hospitalised him for a year and he was discharged from the army in 1944. This injury made him an invalid of sorts for life. Kronrod was married and about this time his son was born. During next four years he continued his studies at the University, simultaneously working at the Atomic Energy Kurchatov Institute. In 1965, ITEP challenged and in 1966–1967 defeated the American chess program Kotok McCarthy. The developers included Adelson Velsky who used Alexander Brudno's adversarial search algorithm and a "general recursive search scheme" by Kronrod. They were advised by Russian chess master A. R. Bitman and world champion Mikhail Botvinnik in what was the first test of Shannon brute force vs. selective search. Kronrod's participation came at great cost. The physics users at ITEP complained, thinking that the lab was being used for game playing, when the division was writing the Crazy Eights card game and chess trying to teach a machine to think.

When the Communist Party reprimanded him in 1968 for cosigning a letter with many mathematicians in defense of the mathematician and logician Alexander Esenin Volpin, a son of the poet Sergei Yesenin, the physicists were able to oust him from ITEP. He was also fired from his professorship. He then directed the mathematics laboratory at the Central Scientific Research Institute of Patent Information (CNIIPI) where he proposed patent reform to stimulate inventions. After gaining support he lost this position to an unsympathetic director. His last position was heading a Central Geophysical Expedition laboratory that processed drilling data where he made calculations for gas and oil exploration, but he was not challenged by this work. He re examined his goals and soon changed course.

Kronrod decided that his best work was to help others and most importantly the terminally ill. He spent his fortune developing milil from a sour milk extract for cancer patients, to fill a shortage of anabol, an expensive drug developed in small quantities by his acquaintance Bogdanov in Bulgaria. He was promised but never acquired an animal testing laboratory so he tested the medicine on himself. Kronrod had no medical degree but he was well informed in medicine. Milil was a last resort for seriously ill patients and was administered by physicians in one case in a hospital ward A. A. Vishnevskiy reserved for treatments by Kronrod's method. Kronrod himself never gave the drug to patients and through physicians gave it away free. The drug was unapproved and a criminal case was brought against him. He regained his research records when a relative of the plaintiff required milil for treatment and the case was dismissed. He slowly recovered when a stroke took his speech and ability to read and write but was forced to resign at the Central Geophysical Expedition and stop all work on math. He saved his own life by asking to be soaked in a tub of very hot water for several hours after a second stroke. He died on 6 October 1986 of a third stroke.