Anatoly Fomenko (original) (raw)

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Russian mathematician

Anatoly Fomenko
Fomenko in 2012
Born (1945-03-13) 13 March 1945 (age 79)Stalino, Ukraine, USSR
Alma mater Moscow State University
Occupation(s) MathematicianProfessor
Employer Moscow State University
Known for New Chronology
Awards State Prize of the Russian Federation

Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko (Russian: Анато́лий Тимофе́евич Фоме́нко; born 13 March 1945 in Stalino, USSR, now the city of Donetsk) is a Soviet and Russian professor of Mathematics at Moscow State University. He is well-known as a topologist and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a painter and illustrator of original artworks inspired by topological objects and structures.

Fomenko is also widely known as a conspiracy theorist. He originated a fictitious and pseudoscientific history called New Chronology, based on works of Russian-Soviet writer Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov.[1]

Fomenko is the son of Timothy Grigorievich Fomenko (Russian: Тимофей Григорьевич Фоме́нко), an industrial engineer, and Valentina Polikarpovna (née Markova) (Russian: Валентина Поликарповна Маркова), a philologist and teacher of Russian language and literature. His parents would later co-author his works on New Chronology in 1983 and 1996. Born in what is now Donetsk, he was raised and schooled in Magadan. In 1959, his family returned to Eastern Ukraine and settled in the city of Luhansk, where Fomenko attended Secondary School No. 26. During secondary school, Fomenko participated in many competitions relating to mathematics and won several medals as a result. Also in 1959, the magazine Pionerskaya Pravda (Russian: Пионерская правда, Pioneer Truth) published his first known science fiction story, "The Mystery of the Milky Way".

Fomenko graduated from the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University in 1967. In 1969, he began studying differential geometry in the same department. In 1970, he defended his thesis "Classification of totally geodesic manifolds realizing nontrivial cycles in Riemannian homogeneous spaces", and in 1972 defended his doctoral thesis, "The decision of the multidimensional plateau problems on Riemannian manifolds." In December 1981, he became a professor of Higher Geometry and Topology, and in 1992, was appointed as head of Differential Geometry and Applications in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at Moscow State University

Fomenko developed the theory of topological invariants of an integrable Hamiltonian system. He is the author of 180 scientific publications and 26 textbooks (including monographs) on mathematics. Fomenko is a specialist in geometry and topology, variational calculus, symplectic topology, Hamiltonian geometry and mechanics, and computational geometry.

Fomenko has served as the editor of several Russian-language mathematics journals and is a member of many councils overseeing dissertations in his field. In 1996, he won the State Prize of the Russian Federation for excellence in mathematics. He is a full member (Academician) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1994), the International Higher Education Academy of Sciences (1993), and the Russian Academy of Technological Sciences (2009). He is also a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (1991).

Fomenko is the author of extensive writings in his original fields of mathematics, and is also known for his original drawings inspired by topological objects and structures.[2]

Historical revisionism

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Fomenko is one of the authors of a concept that manipulates historical chronology. It is known as New Chronology. Fomenko claims that he has discovered new empirico-statistical methods and their application to determine that many historical events do not correspond with the dates on which they are supposed to have occurred. He asserts from this that all of ancient history (including the history of Greece, Rome, and Egypt) is merely a reflection of events that occurred in the Middle Ages, and that all of Chinese and Arab history are fabrications of 17th- and 18th-century Jesuits. Fomenko is the author and sometimes co-author of several books the analysis of historical chronicles as well as the chronology of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

He also claims that Jesus lived in the 12th century A.D. and was crucified on Joshua's Hill; that the Trojan War and the Crusades were the same historical event; and that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were actually Russians, that the lands west of the Thirteen Colonies that now constitute the American West and Middle West were a far eastern part of "Siberian-American Empire" prior to its disintegration in 1775, and many other claims that contradict conventional historiography. As well as disputing written chronologies, Fomenko also disputes scientific dating techniques such as dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating (see Radiocarbon dating § Carbon exchange reservoir for an examination of the latter criticism). His books include Empirico-statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and Its Applications, and History: Fiction or Science?.

Most Russian scientists and worldwide historians consider Fomenko's historical works to be either pseudoscientific or antiscientific.[3][4][5]

Fomenko is a painter and illustrator whose work often depicts objects from mathematics, many related to topology.[6] [7]

  1. ^ "From Marcus Warren in Moscow". The Daily Telegraph. June 14, 2001. Archived from the original on May 25, 2005. Retrieved September 28, 2021.
  2. ^ Bakaev, Egor. "One can consider these images to be photographs of a strange, powerful, and fantastic mathematical world..." butdoesitfloat.com. Retrieved 25 June 2024.
  3. ^ Bulletin "In defence of science" #1 of the Russian Academy of Sciences (in Russian) download in PDF
  4. ^ Bulletin "In defence of science" #2 of the Russian Academy of Sciences (in Russian) download in PDF
  5. ^ http://hbar.phys.msu.ru/gorm/fomenko/zaliznk.htm Archived 2008-09-17 at the Wayback Machine. A critical look at Fomenko's linguistics (in Russian).
  6. ^ Fomenko, Anatoly (29 June 2012). "Anatoly Fomenko Art". ANATOLY TIMOFEEVICH FOMENKO. Archived from the original on 2012-11-28. Retrieved 2018-12-18.
  7. ^ Fomenko, A.T. "ОБРАЗЫ В ТОПОЛОГИИ. Графика А.Т. Фоменко (MATHEMATICS AND MYTH THROUGH THE PRISM OF GEOMETRY: IMAGES IN TOPOLOGY)". chronologia.org (in Russian). Retrieved 25 June 2024.
  8. ^ Berger, Melvyn S. (1985). "Review: Modern geometry (Souremennaya geometriya)". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 13 (1): 62–65. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1985-15366-2.
  9. ^ Berger, Melvyn S. (1988). "Review: Modern geometry—methods and applications. Part II, The geometry and topology of manifolds". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 18 (1): 112–114. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1988-15626-1.
  10. ^ Kirwan, Frances C. (1988). "Review: Differential geometry and topology". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 19 (1): 340–343. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1988-15664-9.
  11. ^ Almgren, Fred (1992). "Review: Variational principles of topology". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 26 (1): 188–192. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-1992-00256-2.
  12. ^ Banchoff, Thomas (1997). "Review: Visual geometry and topology". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.). 34 (1): 35–38. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-97-00694-0.