|
|
You are visitor #    
GREAT PEOPLE OF AZERBAIJAN
|
|
|
Heydar Alirza oglu Aliyev
Heydar Alirza oglu Aliyev was born on 10 May, 1923 in the ancient city of Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan.
Mr. Aliyev graduated from Department of History of Azerbaijan State University. In 1941-44 Heydar Aliyev occupied an official post in Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. From 1944 Mr.Aliyev worked in the State Security Committee and in 1967 he became its Chairman holding the post until 1969. He was the first Azeri ever to occupy this high position and to become a General within the State Security Committee system.
In July, 1969 Heydar Aliyev was elected the First Secretary of Central Committee of Azerbaijan Communist Party and the leader of the Republic. He occupied this position until December, 1982. These 14 years witnessed the development of economy, culture and national selfconsciousness of Azeris.
In December, 1982 Heydar Aliyev was promoted to the post of the first Deputy Prime Minister of the former USSR and worked there until October, 1987. Simultaneously he was the member of the Political Bureau of Central Committee, i.e. one of the leaders of the country.
For 20 years Heydar Aliyev was the member of the Parliament of the Soviet Union, during five years he was the Deputy Chairman of the Parliament.
As a result of disagreements and certain political opposition, in 1987 Heydar Aliyev resigned and left the Political Bureau and Council of Ministers of the USSR.
In 1990, after agression against Azeris and invasion of Azerbaijan by Soviet troops Heydar Aliyev condemned this barbarous action and demanded punishment for the guilty officials. On 19 July, 1991 Heydar Aliyev left the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
in 1991-1993 he was the Chairman of the Supreme Majlis of Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic and Simultaneously-Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan Republic.
On 15 June, 1993 Heydar Aliyev was elected the Chairman of the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan, on 24 June of the same year by the decision of the National Assembly he was empowered as the President.
On 3 October, 1993, Heydar Aliyev was elected the President of Azerbaijan Republic and re-elected for the presidential office on 11 October, 1998 for another 5 year term.
|
Vagit Alekperov
Vagit Alekperov, Forbes magazine's 6th richest in Russia, 27th richest among energy billionaires and 387th richest worldwide with US$1.3 billion of net worth was born in 1950 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Vagit Alekperov graduated in 1974 from the Azerbaijan Institute of Oil and Chemistry. As a mining engineer, he started his career in the nearby Caspian Sea oil fields and moved to the Tyumen oil fields in Siberia in 1979.
One of his first administrative positions came in 1984 when he was appointed general director of a Siberia-based oil company, which he managed until 1990. Then he moved to Moscow where he became Deputy and then First Deputy Minister of Fuel and Energy and then Acting Minister of Fuel and Energy. The following year he designed and then assumed the presidency of what has become Russia's largest private oil company, Lukoil. Patterned after the vertically integrated oil companies of the west, Lukoil initially consisted of three production fields, the initials of which also created the company name.
Vagit Alekperov is the creator of something totally new - the first Russian company to establish itself on a global scale. Employing more than 100,000 people, Lukoil ranks fourth among global oil companies in volume of oil produced, and first in terms of proven oil reserves. It's also the first Russian company to acquire an American company. In December 1998, Lukoil acquired Getty Pretroleum Marketing and its 1,300 U.S. gas stations.
Besides being the CEO of Lukoil, Vagit Alekperov is the recipient of the Global Corporate Leadership Award, Vice President of the International Oil Consortium, a member of the Industrial Policy and Entrepreneurship Council reporting to the Russian government, a member of the Russian Fuel and Energy Ministry collegiums and a Deputy Chairman of the Union of Oil Exporters of Russia.
|
|
|
|
Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich
Born on 27 March 1927 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mstislav Rostropovich began musical studies in early childhood with his parents. His mother was an accomplished pianist, and his father a distinguished cellist who had studied with Pablo Casals. At the age of sixteen he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he studied composition with Prokofiev and Shostakovich. In 1945 he came to prominence overnight as a cellist when he won the gold medal in the first ever Soviet Union competition for young musicians. Thereafter, despite his continued battle with the communist authorities, he became one of the central figures of the music life there, for twenty five years inspiring Soviet cellists, composers and audiences alike.
Due to international recording contracts and foreign tours, Mstislav Rostropovich also came to the attention of the West. He recorded nearly the entire cello literature during this time and attracted an unprecedented large quantity of new repertoire for the instrument through his personal contact to composers such as Benjamin Britten, who wrote his Cello Symphony, his Sonata for Cello and Piano and the three Suites for Solo Cello especially with Rostropovich in mind. Other composers who have written for Rostropovich include Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Boulez, Berio, Messiaen, Schnittke, Bernstein, Dutilleux and Lutoslawski.
Mstislav Rostropovich and his family departed from the Soviet Union in 1974 in the midst of a controversy that attracted international attention.
From 1969 until then Mr. Rostropovich and his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya had supported the banned novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn not only by allowing him to live in their dacha outside Moscow but by writing an open letter to Brezhnev protesting against Soviet restrictions on cultural freedom in 1970. These actions resulted in the cancellation of concerts and foreign tours for Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya, a Soviet media black-out and the cessation of all recording projects. In 1974 they were finally granted exit visas, effectively allowing them to go into exile. Four years later they were stripped of their Soviet citizenship, a decree which held until 1990.
Since 1974 Rostropovich has become one of the leading conductors in the West. He is Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington and is a regular guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic. His recent recordings for Sony Classical include Schnittke´s Cello Concerto no. 2 and In Memoriam, and "Return to Russia", a unique audio and video documentation of Rostropovich´s tour of Russia in 1990 with the National Symphony Orchestra, Washington, his first visit there since his exile Other composers who have written for Rostropovich include Bernstein, Messiaen, Lutoslawski, Dutilleux, Ginastera and Benjamin Britten.
There is a street named after Rostropovich in Baku. He comes back to Baku each year to give 10 day music classes at the local Concervatory.
|
Garry Kasparov
Garry Kasparov was born in Baku, Azerbaijan on 13 April 1963. He was originally called Harry Weinstein. When his father died he was given a Russian version of his mother's maiden name, Kasparova. Garry Kasparov was raised in Baku and at the early age of 6, he had already started playing chess and began to demonstrate his skills as a child chess prodigy. Kasparov's brilliance and intellect captured the attention of Mikhail Botvinnik, former World Champion (1948-1957, 1958-1960, and 1961-1963). Kasparov was invited to attend Botvinnik's exclusive chess school for gifted children. At the school, Kasparov studied and learned chess with some of the most talented chess teachers and students. Students included Anatoly Karpov, and Artur Yuspov, one of the coaches for Viswanathan Anand.
At 13, Kasparov captured the Soviet Junior Champion title and in 1980, at age 17, he became the world junior champion and an International Grandmaster. His ability to think, analyze, calculate and study chess tactics and the tactics of his opponents was being recognized by the chess community.
In the 1984 World Championship in Moscow, Anatoly Karpov would meet the young man who would offer him the greatest challenge and take away his world title. Throughout the championship, both men demonstrated excellent strategy and intellect. After playing eight games, Karpov had taken 4 wins to Kasparov's none. It looked like Karpov was on the road to victory; he just needed one more win to clinch the title. But then came a series of 17 consecutive draws. Kasparov wasn't going to make this championship an easy victory for Karpov. Eventually, after five months, the World Chess Federation cancelled the match, citing exhaustion by both players.
The very next year, Kasparov came back to beat Karpov and made history by becoming the youngest World Champion at age 22. Since then, Kasparov has defended his title against Karpov in 1986, 1987, and 1990. Kasparov also defended his title in 1993 against Nigel Short and in 1995, against Viswanathan Anand on the top floor of the World Trade Center, in New York City.
|
|
|
|
Lev Davidovich Landau
Lev Landau was born on 22 January, 1908 in Baku, Azerbaijan. He studied physics and chemistry at Baku University and then went in 1924 to the Leningrad State University, graduating in 1927. He continued research at the Leningrad Physico- Technical Institute.
In 1929 Landau travelled to Gottingen, Leipzig and Copenhagen where he worked in Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics. From that time he considered himself a pupil of Bohr's whose influence was to dictate the direction of Landau's work.
In 1932 Landau become the head of the Theory Division of the Ukrainian Technical Institute in Kharkov. In addition, in 1935, he was made head Physics at the Kharkov Gorky State University. Landau soon made his School in Kharkov the centre of theoretical physics in the USSR.
In 1937 Landau went to Moscow to become Head of the Theory Division of the Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences.
Landau worked on low-temperature physics, atomic and nuclear physics and plasma physics. The work he did on the theory to explain why liquid helium was super-fluid earned him the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physics.
In 1962, Landau was involved in a car accident after which he was unconscious for six weeks. Several times doctors declared him clinically dead. Remarkably Landau regained consciousness and although in most ways he returned to normal, he could never again perform creative work. He died six years later on 1 April, 1968 having never completely recovered.
|
Lotfi A. Zadeh
(Photo Courtesy: AZER.com)
Lotfi Zadeh was born in 1921 in Baku. When Stalin introduced collectivization of farms throughout the Soviet Union, widespread famine followed, and the Zadeh family moved to Iran. There he continued his education in English in a private Presbyterian school in Tehran. After high school, he sat for the national university exams and placed second in the entire country. In 1942, he graduated from the University of Tehran in electrical engineering.
During World War II, he moved to the US and took a Master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1946 and a Ph.D. from Columbia (New York) in 1949, where he began teaching systems theory. Since 1959, Zadeh has taught at Berkeley, first in the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department where he became Chair in 1963, and later in the Computer Science Division (EECS).
Lotfi Zadeh is perhaps best known for inventing the concept of "Fuzzy Logic", a theory he first presented in 1965. Fuzzy Logic is used for notions that cannot be defined in mathematical preciseness, but which rely on identifying gradations, hence the word, "fuzzy".
Applications are both endless and varied. In addition to consumer applications especially in consumer electronics, Fuzzy Logic is being used in the fields of biomedicine, finances, geography, philosophy, ecology, agricultural processes, water treatment, satellite remote sensing, handwriting analysis, nuclear science, weather forecasting and stock market analysis, to name a few.
The Japanese, with 2,000 scientists involved in Fuzzy Logic, have been very quick to incorporate Fuzzy Logic in the design of consumer products, such as household appliances and electronic equipment and one company, Mitsushita (which sells under the name of Panasonic and Quasar) acknowledged that in 1991-1992 alone, they had sold more than 1 billion dollars worth of equipment that used Fuzzy Logic. The concept is so popular there that the English word has entered the Japanese language, though the Japanese pronounce it more like "fudgy" than "fuzzy".
Zadeh's intellectual contributions are myriad. He's listed in "Who's Who in the World" and since the late 1980s when the Japanese became interested, the field has expanded exponentially. So, too have the acknowledgments of these contributions with honors such as the esteemed Honda Prize in Japan in 1991, medals, honorary memberships, doctorates, fellowships, editorships, and chairmanships from all over the world.
|
|
|
|
Ali Javan
(Photo Courtesy: AZER.com)
Born in 1928 in Tehran of Azeri parentage, Ali Javan came to the United States in 1949 where he received his Ph.D. in Physics at Columbia University in New York City in 1954. In the fall of 1958, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill and tested his "Gas Laser" invention at Bell Laboratories on December 12, 1960.
Javan tested the laser idea with two inert gases, Helium and Neon. It was the first time in the history of science that a continuous laser light beam had emanated from a gas laser apparatus. Shortly after the invention of the Helium-Neon Laser, Javan conducted the first experiment of a telephone conversation ever to be transmitted by laser beam. Nearly 40 years later, laser telecommunication via fiber optics is commonplace, comprising the key technology used in today's Internet.
The Helium-Neon Laser itself turned out to be an immensely valuable instrument. Millions of them are being used both in research laboratories as well as for a wide range of practical uses. One of the most widespread uses of the Helium-Neon Gas Laser is something many people probably take for granted in their everyday lives. It's the scanner that reads the bar codes on shopping items at the check-out counters in supermarkets. That red beam is a laser light which is based on exactly the same principles as Javan's original laser.
Following Javan's invention, laser research at industrial labs and universities has grown in various directions, as has the laser industry itself. The principle of converting electrical energy to laser light beam has been extended to extracting the laser light from semi-conductor elements, which is a whole new invention in itself and a huge industry as it provides the lasers used in Compact Discs (CD's) and other applications.
His contribution to world science through laser technology is widely recognized. In 1975, The Optical Society of America bestowed upon him their most prestigious honor, the Fredric Ives Medal, with a citation that commended him for "producing an optical device (the Gas Laser) of unparalleled applicability to scientific research." His Albert Einstein Award (1993) reads similarly.
Ali Javan has been with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1962.
|
|
|
