at IFIP Congress 1968, Edinburgh 5 - 10 August
at IFIP Congress 1968, Edinburgh 5 - 10 August
After a heart attack on May 8, Academician Anatol Dorodnicyn, the Russian representative to IFIP, our third president, and the last of our founding fathers to represent his country in IFIP, died on June 7, surrounded by his children and his wife Valentina.
He graduated from the Grozny Petroleum Institute in 1931 and began his career as an instructor in Moscow and Leningrad. From 1941 to 1955, he worked at the Central Aerodynamics Institute in Moscow and from 1945 on, belonged to the Computation Center of the U.S.S.R; Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where he served as Director from 1955 until his retirement in 1990. Beginning in 1947, he was a professor at Moscow University, but he liked even better a professorship he had in a small technical college a little bit outside the city. At the early age of 43, he became a full Academy member.
Acad. Dorodnicyn was on the committee for the first World Computer Congress 1959 in Paris and, together with Acad. Panov, was one of the two Soviet founders of IFIP. He served as the delegate of the U.S.S.R. (later, Russia) to IFIP, from its founding in 1960 until his death. Over this period, he missed very few Council and General Assembly meetings. Holder of the Silver Core since its first awarding in 1974, he was IFIP trustee (1965-1967, 1973-1977, and 198O-1984), vice-president (1977-1980), and president (1968-1971). During his presidency, the IFIP Technical Committee on Computer Applications in Technology (TC 5) was launched, and the first attempts were made to establish the IFIP Secretariat in Geneva. The first PROLAMAT conference (Rome, 1969) marked the entry of IFIP into the industrial application area, and he was instrumental in bringing the TC on System Modeling and Optimization (TC 7) into IFIP. His IFIP Congress was held in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, in 1971.
The position of the U.S.S.R. delegate to IFIP was not easy, neither in IFIP nor at home. He had to live with the political system that existed, sometimes defending it, in order to reach the scientific and professional goals he had set for himself.
The Eastern computing community owes a lot to Dorodnicyn. He gave substantial support to many countries. A special case was China, where Dorodnicyn is considered the father of electronic computing. When politics stopped Russian-Chinese cooperation, all links were cut - but at our Council in Beijing, we could see that the friendships with Dorodnicyn had not suffered.
Dorodnicyn had many travel adventures, and he could tell them in a fascinating way, which I can hardly reproduce. For the 1965 Congress, he came to New York - but not his luggage. For the 1969 Council in Brussels, the Belgian government, at the last moment, refused him the visa because of some diplomatic games not related to IFIP or him. In Melbourne in 1980, he invited the entire Soviet delegation at the Congress to the home of one of three Cousin sisters who had escaped from the U.S.S.R., were married in Australia, and lived near Melbourne - proving to the Soviets that the emigrants were not the criminals the government propaganda called them. Some of the comrades started out sitting there with iron faces, but after two hours, they were all singing Ukrainian and Russian songs. For the IFIP Council in Zimbabwe in 1991, he traveled all the way down to the Capital of Mozambique, but when he was unable to catch the interconnecting flight to carry him on, he had to return. His last IFIP meeting was in Buenos Aires. at the 1990 General Assembly.
His family has lost an engage father and grandfather. They all can be proud of a mathematician and computing pioneer, and of an irreplaceable IFIP representative.
Heinz Zemanek
From "The Friends we Have
Lost"; published in "36 Years of
IFIP"
© IFIP, 1996, edited by H. Zemanek, published by the IFIP Secretariat