Toshmuhammad Qori-Niyoziy

Toshmuhammad Niyozovich Qori-Niyoziy was born on 2 September 1897 (21 August in the Old Style calendar) in Khujand, into a shoemaker's family; some sources give 1896 as the year. He first went to a traditional maktab but attended for less than a year. After the family moved to Skobelev (now Fergana), he studied at a Russian-native school and finished it around 1916 with excellent marks.

He began as a teacher: in 1917 he set up a school with Uzbek as the language of instruction in the Fergana Valley. From 1920 to 1925 he directed the pedagogical technical school in Kokand, whose first graduating class in 1924 numbered thirteen. While still a student at Central Asian State University in Tashkent he taught higher mathematics in Uzbek there, and he graduated from its physics and mathematics faculty in 1929 (1930 in some sources).

In 1931 he became the first Uzbek to hold the title of professor, and from 1931 to 1933 he served as rector of the same university. He received his doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences in 1939. From 1937 to 1940 he chaired the Committee of Sciences under the Council of People's Commissars of the Uzbek SSR, from 1940 he headed the Uzbek branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and from 1939 to 1943 he was the republic's deputy head of government for science, culture and the arts. In 1939–1943 he also led the preparation of the new Uzbek alphabet based on Cyrillic.

In June 1941 he chaired the government expedition that opened the tombs of Timur and the Timurids in the Gur-i Amir mausoleum in Samarkand; its members included the anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov, Lev Oshanin and the orientalist Aleksandr Semyonov. From 1941 to 1950 he was a deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet in its first two convocations. Elected an academician in 1943, he became the first president of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR and held the post until 1947.

From 1946 he headed the department of higher mathematics at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation Engineers and Agricultural Mechanization. He developed Uzbek mathematical terminology, wrote the first Uzbek-language mathematics textbooks for universities and schools, and authored several hundred works on the history of science. His monograph “Ulugh Beg's Astronomical School”, based on nearly ten years of work with manuscript sources, appeared in Russian in Moscow in 1950 and won a Stalin Prize in 1952. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Fan va turmush, a member of the International Astronomical Union from 1954 and a corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science from 1967, and he travelled to Japan, India, Italy, Bulgaria, Afghanistan and other countries.

He was named Hero of Socialist Labour on 1 September 1967, received three Orders of Lenin and three Orders of the Red Banner of Labour, and had been Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR since 1939. Toshmuhammad Qori-Niyoziy died in Tashkent on 17 March 1970 and was buried in the Chigatoy cemetery. The Beruni State Prize of the Uzbek SSR was awarded to him posthumously that year, and the Order «Buyuk xizmatlari uchun» in 2002.