Andrey Ershov Soviet pioneer

    Andrei Petrovich Ershov is an outstanding Soviet programmer. The work of which had a significant impact on the development of the Soviet school of programming and computer technology. Under the leadership of Andrei Petrovich, such well-known optimizing programming systems as ALPHA, ALPHA-6, BETA were created, which largely determined the modern methodology of optimizing translation.
    He owns the fundamental results in the theory of operator circuits, the general theory of memory economy, in the theory of program circuits with distributed memory, as well as the initial formulation of the theory of circuits of parallel programs, developed later by his students.

    Andrei Petrovich Ershov was born in Moscow on April 19, 1931, in a family of intellectuals. While studying at school, I did not dream about the profession of a programmer. But life turned out differently.
    In 1949 he graduated from high school in the city of Kemerovo. After graduation, he enters the Moscow State University at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, specializing in computational mathematics.
    In 1953, A.P. Ershov joined the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering (ITM and VT). He participated in the preparation of acceptance tests of the BESM machine. He developed a matrix inversion program as a test problem.
    As a fourth-year student, I listened to the cycle of lectures “Principles of Programming”, delivered by Lyapunov, and who further determined the choice of life path.
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    After graduating from Moscow State University, he is transferred from (ITM and VT) to the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
    In 1957, A.P. Ershov defined the placement function as a method of uninterrupted key information retrieval and investigated its statistical properties and application for the saving algorithm of teams working in linear time. In the same year he was appointed head of the programming automation department at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
    Along with scientific activity, Ershov from the very first steps of programming took part in the teaching process: as a student, at the request of S.A. Lebedeva gave lectures on programming for BESM developers, and in 1957, for the first time, with his participation, classes were organized with students at the mechatics department.
    In the second year of graduate school, he set about organizing a department of programming theory at the Computing Center of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His studies on the creation of a programming program for BESM were published
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    in 1958, “Programming program for a high-speed electronic calculating machine,” which is the first monograph on programming automation in the world literature. It was immediately published abroad.
    In November 1958, A.P. Ershov took part in a conference on the mechanization of thinking processes, which took place at the NFL in Teddington (England). There he met with John Backus, Grace Hopper and John McCarthy. The meeting with John McCarthy later grew into friendship and cooperation.
    In connection with the change of place of work, he is forced to move to Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. Ershov begins to work as head of the laboratory in the Siberian branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In the future, he transferred to work in the created Computing Center, Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, with which his scientific and pedagogical work was connected. The main directions of his activity are related to issues of programming automation and problems of theoretical programming, the objects of which are mathematical abstractions of programs. He wrote many articles in domestic and foreign scientific publications and a number of books.
    In 1962 he defended his Ph.D. thesis, and in 1968 his doctoral dissertation on the topic: “Methods for constructing translators.”
    The AIST project, whose creator and leader was A. P. Ershov, combined a wide range of studies on the architecture of computer systems.
    As part of this project, the country's first developed time sharing system AIST-0 was created. Implemented as a multi-machine complex from domestic computers, this system was largely pioneering and made a great contribution to the development of domestic work on computer architecture and operating systems, which, unfortunately, were later scaled down due to the orientation toward copying foreign developments.


    In 1969 A.P. Ershov became a professor at Novosibirsk University (NSU).
    In 1970 he was elected a corresponding member, and in 1984 an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Foreign colleagues honored him and elected him a member of ACM (1965) and an honorary member of the British Society for Computer Engineering (1974).
    Andrei Petrovich took an active part in scientific life at home and abroad, he could often be seen among the organizers and speakers at seminars, symposia and other events. His reports were of constant interest and often served as an occasion for wide discussion. So at the Second All-Union Programming Conference in 1970, held in Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk, he confidently defended the thesis that the program had finally become a commodity, and this required an appropriate attitude on the part of the state both to the product and its creator, the programmer.
    In 1971, A. P. Ershov published the article “Universal Programming Processor”, which marked the beginning of work on the BETA project. Research on the BETA project was a long-term methodological experimental work related to the understanding of the fundamental foundations of translation and programming languages.
    His works of 1967-1973 had a great influence on the development of theoretical programming. They formulated a number of problems in the theory of program schemes, compared various directions and models of this theory, developed a general system of concepts and connected various results and their applications, in other words, created the foundation of the theory of program schemes as an integral direction of theoretical programming.
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    From the end of the 70s to the end of his life, A. P. Ershov paid great attention to the problems of teaching programming.
    A.P. Ershov was the organizer of many International and All-Union Conferences, a member of the editorial boards of a number of leading foreign and domestic journals, a member of the International Organization for Information Processing (IFIP). In recent years, he was the chief editor of the journal "Microprocessor tools and systems."
    On December 8, 1988, after a serious and prolonged illness, Andrei Petrovich Ershov died.

    In 1988, the charity foundation named after A.P. Ershov was created, the main purpose of which was the development of computer science as an invention, creativity, art and educational activity.

    Andrei Petrovich Ershov was not only a talented scientist, teacher and fighter for his ideas, but also an outstanding, multi-talented person. He wrote poetry, translated the verses of R. Kipling and other English poets into Russian, played the guitar perfectly and sang. Everyone who had the good fortune to know Academician Ershov and work with him will always remember his brilliant ideas, outstanding achievements, and extraordinary goodwill.

    Part of the material taken from ershov.iis.nsk.su

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