Mikhail R. Shura-Bura

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Mikhail R. Shura-Bura

Mikhail Romanovich Shura-Bura, (Михаил Романович Шура-Бура, October 21, 1918 - December 14, 2008)
was a Soviet and Russian outstanding computer pioneer, applied mathematician, scholar, and the patriarch of domestic programming, who has made significant contributions to the establishment and development of software in the USSR .

Biography

Mikhail R. Shura-Bura studied at the Institute of Mathematics at Moscow State University under the guidance of Pavel Alexandrov, where he researched on general topology and submitted a candidate dissertation thesis in 1947 on Projection Spectra of Bicompact Spaces, and in 1952 he defended a doctoral dissertation on The Questions of Solving Mathematical Problems Involving a Large Number of Operations . In 1952, he co-authored the first Soviet textbook on programming . Mikhail R. Shura-Bura was head of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, Moscow Academy of Sciences, and professor of the department of system programming, Moscow State University, head of its Software Engineering Chair, and since 1994 Professor Emeritus at MSU. Two times Mikhail Romanovich Shura-Bura was awarded with the USSR State Prize, in 1955 for his contribution in the Soviet atomic bomb project, and in 1978 for the development of computer software .

Strela

During the mid 50s, Mikhail R. Shura-Bura was involved in the software development for the Strela computer, where he developed programs for the calculation of the energy of nuclear explosions, and trajectory optimizations.

M-20

In 1958, Mikhail R. Shura-Bura became chief developer of the M-20 computer under Sergey Alexeyevich Lebedev , where he designed the instruction codes, and took the most active part in developing the operating system IS-2, a library of standard programs, Algol and Fortran compilers, a chess playing program, and further continued working on trajectory optimizations for satellites, also used for Yuri Gagarin's first journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.

Quotes

from The Early Development of Programming in the USSR .

Bitsets

Machine representation of sets i.e. foundation of Bitboards and Piece-Sets

In 1952, Shura-Bura proposed a universal method for machine representation of sets which are subsets of some general enumerated set {m1,...,mn}. Each such subset {mi1, ... ,mik} is represented by a binary vector |β1,...,βn| where βi1 = βi2 = ... = βik = 1 while the other elements are all equal to zero. Such a vector is called a "logical scale". Computing the cardinality of such sets and other set theoretic operations are rather conveniently reduced to machine instructions such as shift, normalization and bitwise logical operations. 

Computerized Chess

Quote from The Early Development of Programming in the USSR by Andrey Ershov and Mikhail R. Shura-Bura

At the end of the 1950's a group of Moscow mathematicians began a study of computerized chess. Sixteen years later, the studies would lead to victory in the first world chess tournament for computer programs held in Stockholm during the 1974 IFIP Congress. An important component of this success was a deep study of the problems of information organization in computer memory and of various search heuristics. G. M. Adelson-Velsky and E. M. Landis invented the binary search tree ("dichotomic inquiry") and A. L. Brudno, independent of J. McCarthy, discovered the (α,β)-heuristic for reducing search times on a game tree.

See also

• Shura-Bura's Program

Selected Publications

• M. Šura-Bura (1941). К теории бикомпактных пространств. (Zur Theorie der bikompakten Räume), Recueil Mathématique - Matematicheskii Sbornik. Novaya Seriya, Vol. 9(51), No. 2, pdf (Russian, German Resume)
• Mikhail R. Shura-Bura (1952). The Questions of Solving Mathematical Problems Involving a Large Number of Operations. Doctoral Dissertation
• Lazar A. Lyusternik, Aleksandr A. Abramov, Victor I. Shestakov, Mikhail R. Shura-Bura (1952). Programming for High-Speed Electronic Computers. (Программирование для электронных счетных машин)
• V. I. Sobel'man, Mikhail R. Shura-Bura (1962). Realization of recursive procedures in the language of AlGOL-60. (Реализация Рекурсивных Процедур В Языке Алгол-60) Zhurnal Vychislitel'noi Matematiki i Matematicheskoi Fiziki, Vol. 2, No. 2
• Mikhail R. Shura-Bura (1974) Software Implementation Studies: Problems and Prospects. IFIP Congress 1974, Stockholm, Sweden » WCCC 1974
• Andrey Ershov, Mikhail R. Shura-Bura (1980). The Early Development of Programming in the USSR. in Nicholas C. Metropolis (ed.) A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century. Academic Press, pp. 137-196
• The Editorial Board (2009). To the Memory of Mikhail Romanovich Shura-Bura. Programming and Computer Software, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 181–182. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., Original Russian Text © Editorial Board, published in Programmirovanie, Vol. 35, No. 4, pdf

External Links

• Mikhail Romanovich Shura-Bura from the Russian Virtual Computer Museum
• The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Mikhail Shura-Bura
• Шура-Бура, Михаил Романович - Материал из Википедии (Wikipedia.ru Russian)
• Лемма Шуры-Буры - Материал из Википедии (Wikipedia.ru Russian, Lemma Shura-Bura)
• Школа программирования ИПМ им.М.В.Келдыша, Ю.Л.Кетков, Нижегородский университет (Programming School KIAM, by Yu.L.Ketkov, University of Nizhni Novgorod)
• Михаи Романович Шура-Бура, Obituary from Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, Moscow Academy of Sciences (Russian)
• Михаил Шура-Бура родился 21 октября 1918 - Михаил Шура-Бура умер 14 декабря 2008 from calend.ru (Russian)
• Science and Scholarship definition in the TheFreeDictionary.com, article from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979)

References

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