Galina Matvievskaya

Galina Pavlovna Matvievskaya was born on 13 July 1930 in Dnipropetrovsk and grew up in Kharkiv; when the war began she and her mother moved to Orenburg, where she finished school with a gold medal. Her father, Pavel Matvievsky, was a historian and Orenburg local-history scholar. In 1948 she entered the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad State University and graduated in 1954.

After the university she did postgraduate work at the Leningrad branch of the Institute for the History of Natural Science and Technology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, studying Leonhard Euler’s unpublished manuscripts on number theory. She defended her candidate’s dissertation in 1959 and moved to Tashkent that year to join the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR; she headed its department of algebra and mathematical analysis from 1980 to 1985 and was chief researcher until 1994.

Her main subject was the history of mathematics and mathematical astronomy in the medieval Near and Middle East, for which she had to learn Arabic script and read manuscripts in the original. Her first monograph, “The Doctrine of Number in the Medieval Near and Middle East”, appeared in Tashkent in 1967, and she defended her doctoral dissertation in 1968 (her scientific adviser was Academician S. Kh. Sirazhdinov). She later wrote books on al-Biruni, al-Khwarizmi, Ulugh Beg and Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, and with Boris Rosenfeld compiled the reference work “Mathematicians and Astronomers of the Muslim Middle Ages and Their Works” (1983). Separate books are devoted to René Descartes, Petrus Ramus and Albrecht Dürer as a scientist.

Her work was recognised in Uzbekistan: she received the Beruni State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1974 and the title Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR in 1980. In 1984 she was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR and in 2000 a full member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. She was also a full member of the International Academy of the History of Science.

In 1994 Matvievskaya moved to Orenburg and became a professor at Orenburg Pedagogical University. There she turned to the history of the region and to scientific biography: she prepared the multi-volume “Life and Work of P. I. Rychkov” and wrote books on Vladimir Dal and Yakov Khanykov. She joined the Union of Writers of Russia, and her honours include the Orenburg Lyre prize and the All-Russian literary prize “The Captain’s Daughter”. She died in Orenburg on 30 January 2025, aged 94.