Biography
Alexander Friedmann was born to the composer and ballet dancer Alexander Friedmann (who was a son of baptized Jewish cantonist) and the pianist Ludmila Ignatievna Voyachek. He lived much of his life in Saint Petersburg. He fought in World War I (on behalf of Imperial Russia) as a bomber and later lived through the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Friedmann obtained his degree in St. Petersburg State University (1910), became a lecturer in St.-Petersburg State College of Mines, and a professor in Perm State University in 1918.
In June 1925 he was given the job of the director of Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. In July 1925 he participated in a record-setting balloon flight, reaching the elevation of 7,400 m (24,300 ft).
Friedmann died on September 16, 1925, at the age of 37, from typhoid fever that he contracted during a vacation in Crimea.
The moon crater Fridman is named after him.
The Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann in 1922 and the Belgian George Lemaftre independently in 1927 introduced the idea of an expanding universe that contained moving matter.
From his school days, Friedmann found an inseparable companion in Jacob Davidovich Tamarkin, who at the end of his career was one of Brown University's most distinguished mathematicians.
During World War I, he served in the Russian army as an aviator, an instructor and eventually, under the revolutionary regime, as the head of an airplane factory.
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