Biography
Tymoshenko was born in the village of Shpotivka in the Chernigov Governorate of the Russian Empire (now located in Sumy Oblast of Ukraine). He studied at a "real school" in Romny, Poltava Governorate (now in Sumy Oblast) from 1889 to 1896. In Romny his schoolmate and friend was future famous semiconductor physicist Abram Ioffe. Tymoshenko continued his education towards a university degree at the St Petersburg Institute of engineers Ways of Communication. After graduating in 1901, he stayed on teaching in this same institution from 1901 to 1903 and then worked at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical Institute under Viktor Kyrpychov 1903–1906. In 1905 he was sent for one year to the University of Göttingen where he worked under Ludwig Prandtl.
In the fall of 1906 he was appointed to the Chair of Strengths of Materials at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. The return to his native Ukraine turned out to be an important part of his career and also influenced his future personal life. From 1907 to 1911 as a professor at the Polytechnic Institute he did research in the earlier variant of the Finite Element Method of elastic calculations, the so-called Rayleigh method. During those years he also pioneered work on buckling, and published the first version of his famous Strength of materials textbook. He was elected dean of the Division of Structural Engineering in 1909.
In 1911 he signed a protest against Minister for Education Kasso and was fired from the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. In 1911 he was awarded the D. I. Zhuravski prize of the St.Petersburg Ways of Communication Institute that helped him survive after losing his job. He went to St Petersburg where he worked as a lecturer and then a Professor in the Electrotechnical Institute and the St Petersburg Institute of the Railways (1911–1917). During that time he developed the theory of elasticity and the theory of beam deflection, and continued to study buckling. In 1918 he returned to Kiev and assisted Vladimir Vernadsky in establishing the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences – the oldest academy among the Soviet republics other than Russia.
After the Armed Forces of South Russia of general Denikin had taken Kiev in 1919, Tymoshenko moved from Kiev to Rostov-on-Don. After travel via Novorossiysk, Crimea and Constantinople to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, he arrived to Zagreb, where he got professorship at the Zagreb Polytechnic Institute. In 1920, during the brief takeover of Kiev by the Polish army, Tymoshenko travelled to Kiev, reunited with his family and returned with his family to Zagreb.
He is remembered for delivering lectures in Russian while using as many words in Croatian as he could; the students were able to understand him well.
Read more about this topic: Stephen Timoshenko
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