Frederiks Vsevolod Konstantinovich (April 1 [13], 1885, Warsaw — June 6, 1944, Gorky) was a theoretical physicist, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, professor, researcher of liquid crystals, and founder of Soviet electrical prospecting. He spent his childhood in Nizhny Novgorod, where he received his secondary education; he died in the prison hospital of Gorky as a result of an illness that struck him while he was being transported to a prison camp.[1]

Origins and Education

He was born into the family of Baron Konstantin Platonovich Frederiks — a hero of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 — and Baroness Olga Vladimirovna (née von Mengden).[2] Soon after his son's birth, his father was appointed vice-governor in Tobolsk, and in the early 1890s was transferred to Nizhny Novgorod, where in 1906–1907 he served as governor.[1] Vsevolod studied in Nizhny Novgorod at the Alexander Nobility Institute, after which he went abroad: he graduated from the University of Geneva in 1907 and spent two more years there under Charles Guye, studying the internal friction of solids. In 1909 he received a doctorate in philosophy.[2] He then worked in Paris, and from 1911 served as an assistant in theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen under Woldemar Voigt, accompanying him on a trip to the USA.[2]

Scientific Career

With the outbreak of the First World War, Frederiks was interned in Germany and lost his position, but he continued his work — from 1915 as a private assistant to the mathematician David Hilbert; it was also in 1915 that he met Albert Einstein.[2] In the summer of 1918 he returned to Russia and took a post as a laboratory assistant at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Biophysics.[1]

From 1919 he worked in Petrograd: as a senior physicist at the State Optical Institute (until 1923), and from 1920 as a member of the Atomic Commission. From 1923 until the day of his arrest he was a staff member of the Physico-Technical Institute (PTI), rising from senior physicist to head of the Laboratory of Anisotropic Liquids (from 1933).[2] At the same time he taught at Leningrad University (1919–1936) and at the Polytechnic and Pedagogical Institutes.[2] From 1926 he was a consultant to the Geological Committee (TsNIGRI) on electrical prospecting and took part in field expeditions; in 1929 he published a monograph on the fundamentals of electrical prospecting, and in 1933–1935 he consulted for the Petroleum Geological Prospecting Institute.[3]

Frederiks's chief scientific achievement was the discovery of a transition in liquid crystals under the action of a sufficiently strong magnetic or electric field — a phenomenon that entered world science as the Frederiks transition.[1] In 1927 he married Maria Dmitrievna Shostakovich, the elder sister of the composer Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich.[2] In 1934 the Academic Council of the PTI nominated him as a candidate for corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the specialty "physics," but he was not elected to the academy in that year's voting.[2]

Arrest, Imprisonment, and Death in Gorky

On October 21, 1936, Frederiks was arrested in connection with the so-called Pulkovo Affair, on charges of belonging to a counterrevolutionary fascist organization.[3] On May 25, 1937, a visiting session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced him under Articles 58-10 and 58-11 to ten years in a corrective labor camp, with confiscation of property and loss of civil rights for five years.[2]

Frederiks served his sentence at the Taishet camp, doing logging work. In 1938, possibly as a result of petitions by the academicians S. I. Vavilov, A. N. Krylov, and other scientists, as well as D. D. Shostakovich, he was transferred to the Oryol prison.[3] In autumn 1940 he was sent by prisoner transport to Ukhtizhemlag, where he worked as a laboratory assistant at an oil refinery and took part in the work of a geophysical team together with L. S. Polak; their joint article "Toward a Theory of Anisotropic Liquid" was written there.[3] In autumn 1943 Frederiks was sent by prisoner transport to one of the defense "sharashkas" (secret research prisons); on the way he fell ill with severe pneumonia, was taken off the transport, and was placed in the Gorky prison hospital, where he died on June 6, 1944.[1][3] He was buried in Gorky. He was posthumously rehabilitated by a ruling of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on December 8, 1956.[3]

Sources

  1. names52.ru — Frederiks Vsevolod Konstantinovich
  2. bioslovhist.spbu.ru — Frederiks Vsevolod Konstantinovich (1885—1944) — SPbU Biographica
  3. bessmertnybarak.com — FREDERIKS Vsevolod Konstantinovich