By Nathan M Greenfield
The missile attack in late August that badly damaged Odesa’s House of the Scientists was more than a strike at a beloved landmark of this ancient Black Sea port.
For generations of Odesans, Count Michael Tolstoy’s former mansion, built in 1832 and rebuilt after the Second World War, and since 1934 known as the House of the Scientists, has stood as a physical rebuke to the dominant russian narrative that Ukrainians have no science, culture nor academic prowess.
Ukraine’s contribution to science
By situating his educational praxis in the history of science, Alexey S Ladokhin, a biophysicist at the University of Kansas Medical Center, strips away the russian narrative that obscures Ukraine’s contribution to science. Fundamental to molecular spectroscopy, the Jablonski diagramme indicates the electronic states and motion of atoms in a molecule as well as the transitions between them. It was developed by Aleksander Jablonski who, though an ethnic Pole, was born and educated in what is now Ukraine.
“When teaching the Jablonski diagramme, I put up a map of Europe and show that this star is where Jablonski was educated and he was born 20 miles away, all in Ukraine,” said Ladokhin.
The same can be done, Ladokhin says, with a number of famous scientists. One is the geometer Georgy Voronoy who was born and raised in Ukraine and is best known for showing how (Euclidean) planes can be partitioned into cells that contain random points (akin to the map of the United States showing the states with dots indicating cities).
Engineering professors, he notes, could point out that the first helicopter was designed and built by Igor Sikorsky who was born in Kyiv and partly educated at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute that now bears his name.
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