Aleksandr Domoryad

Aleksandr Petrovich Domoryad was born on 13 July 1907 in Tashkent. He graduated from Central Asian State University in 1930. He began teaching at Tashkent higher-education institutions while still a student, and from 1931 he worked at Tashkent University, where he taught for forty-five years in the faculty of physics and mathematics (later the faculty of mechanics and mathematics).

He gave general and advanced courses in higher algebra, group theory, mathematical analysis, number theory, the theory of geometric constructions, the calculus of finite differences, probability theory and various courses on approximate computation, as well as descriptive geometry, nomography and elementary geometry.

When several Soviet universities began training computational mathematicians, Domoryad did much of the organisational work of creating the specialisation “computational mathematics” in the faculty of mechanics and mathematics at Tashkent State University. From 1959 to 1967 he headed the chair of computational mathematics; by the accounts available, about a hundred computational mathematicians were trained there in those years.

Part of his writing was addressed to mathematics teachers. In the second book of the “Encyclopaedia of Elementary Mathematics” (1951) he wrote the section on numerical and graphical methods of solving equations; the encyclopaedia appeared in German in 1952. His book “Mathematical Games and Pastimes” (1961) became a handbook for organisers of extracurricular mathematics work and was translated into English, German, French, Lithuanian and other languages.

Domoryad paid particular attention to working with schoolchildren. In 1934 he founded a school mathematics circle at the university, led the school section of the Tashkent Physical and Mathematical Society for ten years (he was the society’s secretary in 1940–1955), and was one of the initiators of mathematics olympiads in Tashkent: he represented the organising committees of 24 olympiads and was deputy chairman of the first and second republican olympiads.

He received a medal for labour in the Great Patriotic War and the badge “Excellent Worker of Public Education of the Uzbek SSR”. Aleksandr Domoryad died in Tashkent on 23 July 1975.