Holidays
Days of Military Honour
The Days of Military Honour are special memorable dates in the Russian Armed Forces dedicated to the most outstanding victories won by Russia. Some of these dates are state holidays but the majority of them is celebrated purely in the military.
Birthdays
Nikolai Lobachevsky
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (December 1, 1792 – February 24, 1856) was a Russian mathematician and geometer, renowned primarily for his pioneering works on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as Lobachevskian geometry. William Kingdon Clifford called Lobachevsky the "Copernicus of Geometry" due to the revolutionary character of his work.
Georgy Zhukov
Amongst many notable generals in the World War II, G. K. Zhukov was placed at the top in the respect of number and scale of victories and his talent in operational and strategic command was recognized by many people. Many famous military leaders in the world such as Bernard Law Montgomery, Dwight David Eisenhower and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had already recognized Zhukov's great contributions in many important victories in the Second World War. His combat achievements became valuable heritages in humanity's military knowledge, exerted great influence on both the Soviet and the whole world's military theory.
Gennady Khazanov
The Days of Military Honour (Russian: Дни воинской славы, dni voinskoy slavy) are special memorable dates in the Russian Armed Forces dedicated to the most outstanding victories won by Russia. Some of these dates are state holidays but the majority of them is celebrated purely in the military.
ReplyDelete1 December - naval victory over Turkey in the Battle of Sinop, 1853
The Battle of Sinop, or the Battle of Sinope, took place on 30 November 1853 at Sinop, a sea port in northern Anatolia, when Imperial Russian warships struck and annihilated a patrol force of Ottoman ships anchored in the harbor. The battle was part of the Crimean War, and a contributory factor in bringing France and Britain into the conflict.
Fighting at sea between Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been going on for weeks, and the Ottomans had sent several squadrons into the Black Sea to patrol. One of these squadrons, under Osman Pasha, ended up at Sinope, joining the frigate Kaid Zafer which had been part of an earlier patrol, and being joined by the steam frigate Taif from a smaller squadron. The Ottomans had wanted to send ships of the line to Sinope, but the British ambassador in Constantinople, Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe, had objected to this plan, and only frigates were sent.
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is the first mathematician to publicly publish a system of non-Euclidean geometry. Although Karl Friedrich Gauss preceded him in the late 18th century and János Bolyai had devised a similar (though less analytical) conclusions around the same time, Lobachevsky showed that Euclid's Fifth postulate(also known as the Parallel postulate) could not be proved on the basis of the other postulates, and in turn created a new way of looking at geometry and geometric problems. Most of Lobachevsky's contemporaries scoffed at his conclusions, and he only became credited with his discoveries after his death. In fact, Lobachevsky sought credibility by publishing in different languages, but only a few of his colleagues supported his findings, including Gauss. Lobachevsky also did relevant research in other areas, including infinite series theory, integral calculus, probability, and the approximation of roots of algebraic equations.
ReplyDeleteAwards
ReplyDeleteZhukov was a recipient of decorations. Most notably he was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union four times. Aside from Zhukov, only Leonid Brezhnev was a four-time recipient (the latter's were self-awarded).
Zhukov was one of only three recipients to receive the Order of Victory twice. He was also awarded high honors from many other countries. A partial listing is presented below.
Zhukov was the most acclaimed Soviet military commander of World War Two. His victories over the Germany army in the east, often at great cost in Soviet lives, did much to hasten the end of the war.
ReplyDeleteZhukov rose through the military ranks, becoming an expert in armoured warfare. In 1938, he was sent to fight the Japanese in Mongolia and in August 1939 inflicted a significant defeat on the Japanese army at the Battle of Khalkin-Gol.
Stalin now regarded Zhukov as a threat and demoted him to command the Odessa military district, far away from Moscow. After Stalin's death, Zhukov returned to favour, becoming minister of defence in 1955. He then fell out with Nikita Khrushchev, who sacked him in October 1957. Khruschev's fall in 1964 allowed the restoration of Zhukov's reputation, although he was not appointed to office again. He died on 18 June 1974.
In January 1941, Joseph Stalin appointed Zhukov chief of the army general staff. He was dismissed six months later after a disagreement with Stalin, but was retained in the army headquarters. He was on the sidelines during the rapid German advance into the Soviet Union from June 1941. In October 1941, Zhukov was assigned to direct the defence of Moscow and organised a counter-attack against the Germans.
Well, now we know a lot about Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky. But still, very few people know what Lobachevskian geometry really is. Lobachevskian geometry is called non-Euclidean geometry. It is a theory rich in content and with applications both in mathematics and physics. Its historical significance is that Lobachevskii by constructing it proved the existence of a geometry differing from Euclidean geometry. One modern way of defining Lobachevskian geometry is to say that it is the geometry of a disk, that is, the interior of a circle, in an ordinary (Euclidean) plane, with suitable changes of terminology.
ReplyDeleteThe Time of Troubles (Russian: Смутное время) was a period of Russian history comprising the years of interregnum between the death of the last Russian Tsar of the Rurik Dynasty, Feodor Ivanovich, in 1598, and the establishment of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613. In 1601–1603, Russia suffered a famine that killed one-third of the population, about two million. At the time, Russia was occupied by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Dymytriads, and suffered from civil uprisings, usurpers and impostors.
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