Where's my Soviet jetpack?

March 2, 2009 1:42 PM

Soviet science: Besides the obvious topic of space exploration, name some examples of post World War II Soviet science that were so good, they entered global, widespread use without much modification and are perhaps still in use today.

Example No. 1: Stephen Hawking, British.

Example No. 2: Watson (American) and Crick (British) describe DNA.

Example No. 3: Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier discover HIV.

It doesn't even have to be original work, but how about breakthrough work with others' tech? An example of this would be Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founding Sony and doing remarkable things with American-designed transistors.

Bad example: Dmitri Mendeleev's creation of the periodic table happened long before World War II.

So, where are my mad Soviet scientists and what did they do?

posted by Cool Papa Bell to Science & Nature (8 answers total)

Radial Keratotomy developed by Svyatoslav Fyodorov. He used a scalpal; now we use lasers and call it LASIK.
posted by Rash at 1:51 PM on March 2, 2009

A bit weird, maybe, but how about Kalashnikov's AK-47? In a century of industrialized murder, it's hard to think of a more ubiquitous weapon.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:53 PM on March 2, 2009

Phage therapy, widely used in the Soviet Union to treat infections while virtually ignored in the West in favor of antibiotics; it hasn't yet entered "global, widespread use," but given the issue of antibiotic resistance, researchers are starting to look at it with renewed interest.
posted by scody at 1:59 PM on March 2, 2009

There's a lot of superb Soviet-era mathematicians whose work is very much in use today. Kolmogorov, just by himself, is a whole continental mass of math awesomeness. His work even set up some of the foundations for constructive mathematical proofs (of which we had a nice FPP a few days ago), a very active area with computer science applications all around us.
posted by Iosephus at 2:02 PM on March 2, 2009

In the vein of Komologorov (who is a little early for the postwar days, though certainly of enormous importance), I would say that Lev Landau is one of the most amazing theoretical physicists of the mid-20th century. His approach to explaining superconductivity and superfluidity is still useful today, and you trip over his name all throughout the study of condensed matter physics as a whole.
posted by Schismatic at 2:15 PM on March 2, 2009

Soviet Nobel Prize Winners here:

Cherenkov Radiation. Frank and Tamm.

Alferov. (physics)

Abrikosov (physics)

Laser inventor.

More Lasers

Ginzburg. (astrophysics)

Superfluidity.

Landau (quantum physics)

Semyonov (chemistry)

More noteworthy russians here.
posted by damn dirty ape at 2:17 PM on March 2, 2009

Dmitri Dmitrievich Maksutov, inventor of the Maksutov telescope.
posted by exphysicist345 at 9:35 PM on March 2, 2009

I came in to mention Kolmogorov, who has already been covered, so I'll settle for Anderi Tupolev.
posted by ghost of a past number at 1:30 AM on March 3, 2009