Vadim Aleksandrovich Trapeznikov

Born Nov. 15 (28), 1905, in Moscow. Soviet scientist in electrical-machine building, automation, and control processes. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1960; corresponding member, 1953); Hero of Socialist Labor (1965). Member of the CPSU since 1951.

After graduating from the Moscow Higher Technical School in 1928, Trapeznikov was on the staff of the All-Union Electrotechnical Institute until 1933. From 1930 to 1941 he taught at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute; he became a professor at the institute in 1939. He joined the staff of the Institute of Automation and Telemechanics (now the Institute of Problems of Control) in 1941 and was made the institute’s director in 1951. Trapeznikov became the head of a subdepartment at the Moscow Physicotechnical Institute in 1954, the chairman of the National Committee of the USSR on Automatic Control in 1959, and the first deputy chairman of the State Committee on Science and Technology of the Council of Ministers of the USSR in 1965.

Trapeznikov’s main works deal with methods for the design, the construction, and the economic and technological analysis of electrical machines and transformers; techniques for building high-speed automatic devices and modular automatic systems; methods of simulating automatic control systems; and the economics of scientific and technological progress. He is a coinventor of the USSR’s first electronic simulators.

Trapeznikov is an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1951, and he has been awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, three other orders, and various medals.

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