Kyrille Popoff in the Bulgarian upheaval
speaker: Laurent Mazliak (University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France)abstract: Bulgaria is a country in which First World War has played a singular role. It was indeed essentially conceived (at least at the beginning) as the continuation of the two balkanic wars of 1912 and 1913, and therefore as the third balcanic war. After having kept its neutrality for more than one year (between August 1914 and September 1915), the Bulgarian government eventually decided to join the side of the Central Empires, and quite ironically also of Turkey. The idea was basically to take revenge from the second balkanic war in which Bulgaria was opposed to all its neighbors. The neutrality period was filled by intense discussions in which each side tried to draw Bulgaria to itself, and this is not without reminding some aspects of the corresponding period in Italy and the polemics about interventismo. After having presented some general aspects concerning these questions, I shall propose in my talk to follow the original trajectory of an astronomer-mathematician, Kyrille Popoff, who tried to make his way through the complicated political involvments of his country. After having studied in France with Poincaré, Popoff came back to Sofia during the balkanic wars and was mobilized during the whole Great War. During this time, he tried to apply Poincaré's methods in cælestial mechanics to ballistical questions and succeeded in implementing original techniques devoted to the adjustment of artillery and made them known in Germany. At the beginning of 1920s, he managed to leave isolated Bulgaria for a research stay in Berlin and cleverly used his former friendly connections with French mathematicians (in particular with Jacques Hadamard) to obtain the publication of his papers in France and to be invited in Paris as soon as 1924 to teach one of the first course in ballistics at Paris University.
timetable:
Fri 22 May, 15:45 - 16:45, Sala Stemmi
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