Alexander Ivanovich Mikhailov (; 6 December 1905, Zemetchino – 6 February 1988,

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

) was a Soviet and Russian

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

and information scientist. He was one of the most influential thinkers related to the field of information science in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

and the

Eastern Bloc The Eastern Bloc, also known as the Communist Bloc (Combloc), the Socialist Bloc, the Workers Bloc, and the Soviet Bloc, was an unofficial coalition of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were a ...

Biography

Mikhailov graduated in 1931 in

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines and mechanism (engineering), mechanisms that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and engineering mathematics, mathematics principl ...

from the Mendeleev Institute and had a successful career in plane and aircraft engineering in the 1930s and 1940s. At the beginning of the 1950s, he participated in the creation and development of

VINITI VINITI (; All-Russian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information; former All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) is a subsidiary of the Russian Academy of Sciences devoted to gathering scientific and technical inform ...

, an institute devoted to the study and practice of Scientific Information in Russia. The institute opened in 1952, and Mikhailov became director from October 1956 until his death. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Mikhailov had considerable participation in the

International Federation for Information and Documentation The International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) was an international organization that was created to promote universal access to all recorded knowledge through the creation of an international classification system. FID stand ...

, became two times vice-director of the institute (1969 to 1976 - 1981 to 1988), coordinating the Study Committee Research on Theoretical Basis of Information, or FID/RI and became the editor-in-chief of the institute periodical, ''International Forum for Information and Documentation'', between 1975 and 1988. In the 1960s, he developed, with other authors, the concept of

Informatics Informatics is the study of computational systems. According to the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe, informatics is synonymous with computer science and computing as a profession, in which the centra ...

(Informatika in Russian), related to the study, organization and the

dissemination To disseminate (from Latin, lat. ''disseminare'' "scattering seeds"), in the field of communication, is to broadcast a message to the public without direct feedback from the audience. Meaning Dissemination takes on the theory of the traditional ...

of scientific information. His principal works in this field are the books ''Fundamentals of Scientific Information'' (1965), ''Fundamentals Of Informatics'' (1968) and ''Scientific Communications and Informatics'' (1976), all of them written with and .

References

* (1975) On The Occasion of the Seventieth Birthday Of Professor A. I. Mikhailov, Scientific and Technical Information Processing, volume 2, nº6, pgs. 67–73. * (1988) Alexander Ivanovich Mikhailov, Fid News Bulletin, Volume 38, issue 2. {{DEFAULTSORT:Mikhailov, Alexander 1905 births 1988 deaths 20th-century Russian engineers People from Morshansky Uyezd D. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia alumni Recipients of the Order of the Badge of Honour Recipients of the Order of Lenin Recipients of the Order of the October Revolution Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner of Labour Russian computer scientists Soviet computer scientists Soviet engineers Burials at Kuntsevo Cemetery Russian scientists