Arkady Kryamimsky: Memories of the Father

On November 3, 2014, Arkady Viktorovich Kryimsky , mathematician, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, my father died. He was a talented scientist and artist, poet, writer, in general, a real creator, a man with a boundless fantasy and a charge of warm optimism. For me, my father was the main teacher, a life guide and support. <...>

My father, Arkady Kryami, was born in 1949 in a family of Russian emigrants in China, in the city of Tsindao. His father was a successful architect there, and his mother was a teacher of English and stenography. In 1954, the Kryamsky with two young children, Arkash and Fedya, driven by patriotism, were repatriated in the USSR. In their homeland, they had to not be easy - the young architect was sent to the virgin lands. But a year later, Kryamimsky managed to move to Sverdlovsk, where Arkasha and Fedya grew up and spent most of his life.

The childhood of the Kryamim brothers in the fifties and sixties was difficult, but happy. Father often recalled this period. He told us how he and his brother ran through the area of ​​the area that was still under construction, how they laid nails under the train to make daggers, climbed into construction sites, in general, led the life of ordinary Soviet teenagers. But already at a young age, both of the Kryamsky began to discover outstanding creative abilities. They painted comics, wrote poems and stories. <...>

The choice of career for the father was complicated. For many years, he was engaged in drawing and quite seriously examined the career of the artist. At the same time, science attracted him - first physics, and then more strict and clear mathematics. In the end, science won, and the father entered the Faculty of Mathematics of the Ural State University. But the tendency to art never left him. Father dreamed, retiring, again to devote himself to painting. However, this dream was not destined to come true. Many of his ideas will remain pencil sketches.

Being an artist in the soul, his father always remained a master of interpretation: in art galleries, he willingly took upon himself the role of the guide and arranged for us the most fascinating tours. Father spoke not so much about the historical context of paintings as he imagined his vision of what the artist portrayed. Even from incomprehensible abstract paintings, the father with his boundless imagination learned multi -level stories. The most striking and interesting interpretations of paintings resulted in separate works of art. So, for example, the father described in his verses and songs [1] the paintings of Bruegel, Petrov-Vodkin, Malevich. The ability to find new, non -trivial interpretations of works of art, mathematical results, and simply events in life were his visiting card.

In his student years, the father became interested in the tasks of optimal management. In these tasks, it is necessary to find the function of control of the dynamic system, which optimizes the specified criteria for the quality of the system behavior. For example, how should the driver put pressure on the gas pedal in order to drive from point A to point B with the minimum gas of gasoline? The theory of optimal management began to develop in the fifties of the last century at the school of Lev Semenovich Pontryagin in Moscow, and in Sverdlovsk, Nikolai Nikolaevich Krasovsky and his students at the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics (IMM) were actively engaged in these tasks.

In 1971, his father entered graduate school and three years later under the leadership of Yuri Sergeevich Osipov, a student of Krasovsky, defended his thesis on differential games in systems with delay. While as a graduate student, he became an employee of the Dif Labe Lab, recently created in the IMM. equations, where he continued to work after protection. The father began, in particular, to study the behavior of differential games in systems with a non -lipshita right part. Lipshitsa condition is a standard, “natural” condition for the right parts of differential equations. The properties of such "typical" differential games were previously established by N.N. Krasovsky and A.I. Subbotin.

However, in some applied tasks, the Lipshitsa condition was violated, and it was necessary to understand how much the system conditions could be loosened, while maintaining the basic properties of its behavior. The father indicated this very “area of ​​preservation” in his doctoral work, which he defended in 1981. Colleagues, including N.N. Krasovsky, they considered this result very important.

Many years later, I, being a graduate student, asked my father about this period of his scientific career. How does he, a beginner inexperienced scientist, did not succumb to the feeling of his own powerlessness and uselessness in comparison with such luminaries as Krasovsky and Subbotin? After all, it seems as if they, with their huge talent and experience, will take a minute to solve the problem that you will have for months. My father’s answer was unexpected for me. “Yes,” he said, “they may be much more talented than you. But their time and approaches are limited. Even giants cannot solve all scientific problems; There are too many unresolved tasks. And even to the tasks that they try to solve, they will not always find solutions, because sometimes decisions are outside their horizons. Therefore, look for new tasks - and look for new, non -traditional solutions. ”

Simultaneously with success in the work, changes took place in the personal life of Arkady. In 1973, he met his future wife and a devoted life partner Galina Nosova (later Kryamyskoy), who at that time also worked in the IMM. In 1981, I had a born, and in 1986 - my sister Alexander. Despite the general stagnation in the country, the seventies and the first half of the eighties were probably the happiest years of life. <...>

Then the father received his most important scientific results. He solved the problem of sustainable circulation of the controlled system in real time. The approach that he has developed restores the parameters of the system (speed, control criteria, interference) on the history of temporary observations and allows you to dynamically use these parameters in the management process. Gradually, he developed his scientific style, his scientific philosophy. He deeply penetrated the essence of the task and was looking for new, original approaches to the solution. He often said that he likes to go not along the beaten paths, but “across”, “on the perpendicular”. And he successfully found such “perpendicular” paths that ultimately led him to the initially set target. At the same time, such a creative approach has never been to the detriment of the clarity of the presentation and the maximum severity of the evidence. Here is what his colleague and friend, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Georgievich Chentsov speaks about the research of his father:

“ AVK conducted fruitful scientific research on a wide range of areas of modern mathematics and perfectly owned the means that are formed in these specific and very different directions at first glance. In sporting language, he was a “multi -side” in mathematics and managed to make a lot of important and useful in its most diverse areas. He often saw such constructions that other researchers somehow did not pay attention to. His research methods were filigree and at the same time effective in practical terms (present, and not invented unity of theory and applications). His scientific activity is a kind of poetry in mathematics, while many are also important and useful, but still prose. ”

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 fell on the heyday of his father’s scientific career and found him by surprise. The ideal and clear world of mathematics suddenly came across insurmountable household obstacles. Overnight, Sverdlovsk turned into Yekaterinburg, the shelves of stores were empty, the salary disappeared, inflation burned the savings. And there are two children at home. Many colleagues, under pressure from circumstances, were forced to leave the institute and engage in commercial activities in order to feed their families. It is difficult for me to imagine what my father would do if he had to stop doing science. Fortunately, he managed to avoid this difficult decision. By a successful coincidence, the father received a position at the International Institute of Applied System Analysis (IIASA) under Vienna [2] , and our family moved to Austria in 1993.

So at the age of 44, Arkady Kryamysky was forced to start a new life. In Vienna, there was no need to worry about feeding the family. But the new job brought a new set of difficulties in return for the old. The IIASA task was to conduct scientific research and the formation of strategic recommendations for solving global problems. The father headed the Dynamic Systems Department (DYN) [3] , the purpose of which was to develop new methods of mathematical modeling of complex social, economic and environmental systems that could be used by other departments of IIASA.

In addition to him, no one constantly worked in the department at that time; Colleagues-employees came on business trips for several months a year. At this post, my father was not just to engage in mathematics. It was necessary to develop the department in fact from scratch: to build relationships with the leaders of other departments; Understand what mathematical tasks can interest them; Organize productive cooperation with them. In addition to the fact that these were new managerial duties for the father, IIASA, being an international organization, was a very politicized institution. In the early nineties there was a tough atmosphere of rivalry for limited financial resources. To a new person, and even from the newly -made Russia, which hardly paid her contributions to IIASA, some employees of the institute reacted with distrust, if not with undisguised unfriendliness.

However, over time, his father organically built into the staff of the institute (which, among other things, contributed to his brilliant knowledge of English), gained new friends and allies here. Not only his powerful scientific potential, but also his impeccable professional ethics and a warm attitude towards people bribed people in his father. He was always attentive to others, his door literally was always open, and he did everything possible to help his colleagues, even in difficult circumstances for himself. At the same time, he was strict to himself: all obligations had to be fulfilled clearly on time.

Soon the first successes appeared in a new place. Together with colleagues A.M. Tarasiev and S.M. Aseev’s father formulated and solved several important applied economic tasks that arose from interaction with economists. One of them was the task of how a technologically lagging country should optimally distribute its labor resource in order to minimize the lag. In addition to practical interest, this task turned out to be interesting from a mathematical point of view: it fell into a little -studied class of tasks of optimal management on an endless horizon, for which the use of standard results of Pontryagin caused difficulties. To the wording of this task, the father partly came thinking about the fate of Russia. It was clear to him that Russia was lagging behind the West in its technological development, and the solution of this problem was an attempt for him to provide all possible assistance to the country.

Father was a real patriot in the classical sense of the word, that is, in practice, and not in words. When in 1996 the term of his contract in IIASA expired, he decided to return to Russia, although there was an opportunity to extend the contract. At that time I was 15 years old, and the question arose about my further education. My father was firmly convinced that I needed to graduate from the university in Russia. It seemed to him then that with the strengthening of democracy, Russian science would be able to recover from heavy personnel and financial losses of the beginning of the nineties and again reach the world level. He, like his own father, forty years ago, believed in the bright future of his country.

Having returned to Russia, his father entered work at the Steklov mathematical Institute in Moscow and began teaching at the Department of Optimal Management at the Department of Computation Mathematics and Cybernetics (VMK) at Moscow State University, and in 1997 was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And although mathematics has always been his main passion, with age (and with managerial experience acquired in IIASA), his father began to more acutely feel the need to bring immediate benefits to society.

The lesson of applied mathematical tasks was partly a manifestation of such activity, since these tasks, at least potentially, could help humanity in solving important pressing issues of the economy, environment, demography. At the same time, his father tried to help the students and employees of his department on the VMK: he organized seminars on new topics, found funding sources, contributed to students' trips to a summer school in IIASA.

Father played the role of a link between different groups of scientists and students. He initiated many joint projects between IIASA in Vienna, IMM in Yekaterinburg, Navy in Moscow, and later between other institutions. The father saw in IIASA one of the few really acting tools for the integration of Russia into world science, without which the development of Russian science was unthinkable. <...>

In 2006, becoming a valid member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, his father returned to IIASA again for the role of the leader of the DYN program, this time for four years. Following his philosophy “go across”, the father, in addition to his native topics of differential games and management theory, took up the new tasks of applied theory of probability and statistics. Together with colleagues and students in IIASA, he began to develop a method of predicting catastrophic changes in the dynamics of the system based on the observed time series.

The initial motivation for this task was the August 1998 crisis in Russia, when the Russian financial market collapsed. Was it possible to predict or even prevent this crisis? An analysis of the fluctuations of financial indicators revealed that a number of microscopic, but quite unambiguous warning signals preceded this catastrophic collapse. The results of this analysis were applicable not only for financial, but also for economic and environmental systems.

In recent years, my father has also been deeply interested in the new fundamental problem of an integrated understanding of complex systems, such as the climate of our planet. Unlike classic "simple" systems, such as a mechanical pendulum, complex systems cannot be described in one equation or even a system of equations; Their description consists of many different levels, which are often described by different types of mathematical models.

Father began with a formulation of a seemingly elementary question. Suppose we measure a certain parameter of the system in two different ways - this situation arises in science very often. The problem is that these measurements are never fully consistent. But how to evaluate the actual value of the parameter, having such a set of conflicting data? The father developed the method of “integration” of random quantities, which constructively answers this question.

At the end of 2012, his father resigned as the leader of the Dyn project. He said that he did not want to "stay in one place for too long" and that "we must free the road to a new generation." The post of the project leader was taken by his student Elena Rivne. Meanwhile, his father returned to Moscow and devoted himself to the organization of science. He initiated the International School of Young Scientists on Mathematical Problems of Economic Growth based on the Faculty of VMK [4] . The organization of such events in Russia is a task, as you know, it is difficult to achieve financing, and even when there is money, their implementation inevitably encounters impenetrable jungle of bureaucracy.

The father did not learn to use his high status academician to solve these problems - to play politics to him. He overcame the obstacles in the way with his hard work. There were situations when he had to invest personal savings in the school organization. But the main goal - the integration of young Russian scientists into the world scientific environment - was too important for him to put school at risk. As a result, the school has been successfully passing for several years.

In his free hours, the father still devoted himself to creativity. He continued to write poetry and even joined several communities of amateur poets: the literary club “Russian Poetry in Austria” and the creative association of Art Pro & Contra in Vienna, as well as the project “Library of modern poetry” in Moscow. In 2013, his poems were first published. Father was very proud of this achievement. <...>

Poem by A.V. Kryimsky, inspired by one of the poetic evenings.

Many
Many, in the logic of mathematics, -
Uncertain, you know, concept.
Is there a lot? So, its elements are immediately visible to us.
Say, the icons applied by me on this paper tape.
Or a year, say, someone’s, from two to, say, fifty.
Guilt. Restaurant dishes. Thoughts that cannot be taken out without a glass.
Storms. Tsunami, collapsed on Tokyo.
Tire points (SOS LOD, SOS), monotonous, lonely.
Drawers to be subject to lists, search.
Disks in the temples. Cosmonauts with batons (someone's glasses were jerked here). Policies.
Длинные, плавно-альковные шейные линии,
что так любили, да, ох как любили мужчины Алинины…
Этот (Никитой, допустим, зовут) элемент того множества
с диском в висках (космонавт) забирает Петра, подлежащего нынче призыву, в заложники.
Петр, завинченный глухо в подлодку,
шлет монотонные SOSики с дна под штормимым-цунамимым Токио.
Жуть, что сказать? Сгасишь сплин запотевшею рюмочкой
тут, в ресторанчике «Дума», года завернув, как салфеточку, в трубочку.
А на салфетке — мной начерно вычерченные каракули
сплошь математикой каркали… каркали…

В июле 2013 года Госдума приняла закон о расформировании РАН и формировании новой. Катастрофические последствия этого решения для российской науки были отцу ясны мгновенно, и он, проявив несвойственную ему в повседневной жизни жесткость, открыто заявил о своей позиции. Вместе с группой коллег-единомышленников он написал открытое письмо руководству страны о неприятии закона [5] , провел опрос мнения ученых о проблемах российской науки и способах их решения, организовал экстренную конференцию, посвященную реформе. Вероятно, отчасти благодаря этой деятельности, наиболее катастрофических последствий нового закона удалось избежать, но само решение осталось в силе. Отец был глубоко разочарован бездействием сообщества ученых и считал, что главная битва за будущее российской науки проиграна.

В августе 2014 года мои родители впервые за десять лет навестили меня в США. Мы всей семьей катились на машине по бескрайним просторам «дикого Запада», спорили, смеялись, говорили о жизни, мечтали о будущем. Неожиданно кончился бензин, и нам пришлось остановиться на обочине. Я бегал, суетился, нервничал в ожидании помощи. А отец был спокоен и размерен. Он как будто не участвовал в происходящем. Он взял видеокамеру и начал снимать горы, заходящее солнце, с гулом мчащиеся по шоссе грузовики и нас, копошившихся возле заглохшей машины. Мелочи. В аэропорту мы, как всегда, прощались на несколько месяцев, до Нового года. А 3 ноября отца не стало.

Январь – февраль 2015 года

Автор искренне благодарит за помощь Г.С. Кряжимскую, А.А. Кряжимскую, Е.А. Ровенскую, А.Г. Ченцова, С.М. Асеева, А.М. Тарасьева, В.И. Максимова, А.П. Кулешова и B. Fath.

1. www.stihi.ru/avtor/filonov25
2. www.iiasa.ac.at
3. www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/researchPrograms/AdvancedSystemsAnalysis/index.html
4. www.agora.guru.ru/display.php?conf=msa2015
5. http://trv-science.ru/2013/07/02/zayavlyaem-ob-otkaze-vstupit-v-novuyu-ran/