Vladimir Lenin

Contemporary anatomists no longer believe that morphology alone can determine the functioning of the brain. We can only speculate about the effect that the "method" would have had on the development of calculus had it been known in the 16th and 17th centuries. Further research was continued by the Soviet team, but the work on Lenin's brain was no longer advertised. As a result, his mechanical method was lost until around 1900, after the arithmetization of analysis had been carried out successfully. Vogt's work was considered unsatisfactory by the Soviets. Many of his works were lost when the library of Alexandria was burnt (twice actually) and survived only in Latin or Arabic translations. However the conclusion of its relevance to genius was contested. During the Middle Ages the mathematicians who could understand Archimedes' work were few and far between.

Vogt published a paper on the brain in 1929 where he reported that some pyramidal neurons in the third layer of Lenin's cerebral cortex were very large. He and his contemporaries probably constitute the peak of Greek mathematical rigour. The Institute of Brain was created in Moscow for this purpose. Archimedes' works were not widely recognized, even in antiquity. The Soviet government commissioned the well-known German neuroscientist Oskar Vogt to study Lenin's brain and to locate the precise location of the brain cells that are responsible for genius. Pappus of Alexandria writes that Archimedes had written a practical book on the construction of such spheres entitled On Sphere-Making. Lenin's brain was removed before his body was embalmed. For some time this was assumed to be a legend of doubtful nature, but the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism has changed the view of this issue, and it is indeed probable that Archimedes possessed and constructed such devices.

Despite Lenin's expressed wish shortly before death that no memorials be created for him, various politicians sought to better their own position vicariously by association with Lenin after his death, and his character was elevated to almost mythical status, with statue after monument after memorial springing up in his honor. He credits Thales and Eudoxus for constructing these devices. Instead his body was embalmed and placed on permanent exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow. One device mapped the sky on a sphere and the other predicted the motions of the sun and the moon and the planets (i.e., an orrery). Necessary equipment was purchased abroad, but for a variety of reasons the plan was not realised. Apart from general physics he was an astronomer, and Cicero writes that the Roman consul Marcellus brought two devices back to Rome from the sacked city of Syracuse. During the early 1920s the Russian movement of cosmism was quite popular and there was an intent to cryogenically preserve Lenin's body in order to revive him in the future. Using only ancient Greek geometry, he also gave the equilibrium positions of floating sections of paraboloids as a function of their height, a feat that would be taxing to a modern physicist using calculus.

Lenin's wife discovered the paper in Lenin's study, and read it to the central committee, who while believing parts of it, did not take it to heart, and as such, these sharp criticisms of the internal party were not more widely released. He was the first to identify the concept of center of gravity, and he found the centers of gravity of various geometric figures, assuming uniform density in their interiors, including triangles, paraboloids, and hemispheres. Of Stalin, who had been the Communist Party's general secretary since April 1922, Lenin said that he had "unlimited authority concentrated in his hands" and suggested that "comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post". (He famously discovered the latter when he was asked to determine whether a crown had been made of pure gold, or gold adulterated with silver; he realized that the rise in the water level when it was immersed would be equal to the volume of the crown, and the decrease in the weight of the crown would be in proportion; he could then compare those with the values of an equal weight of pure gold). Most famous of these is Lenin's Testament, which among other things criticized top-ranking communists such as Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. He invented the field of statics, enunciated the law of the lever, the law of equilibrium of fluids and the law of buoyancy. After his first stroke, Lenin published a number of papers indicating future directions for the government. Archimedes is probably also the first mathematical physicist on record, and the best before Galileo and Newton.

Lenin's preserved body is on permanent display in Moscow. He proved that the area and volume of the sphere are in the same ratio to the area and volume of a circumscribed straight cylinder, a result he was so proud of that he made it his epitaph. The city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor; this remained the name of the city until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when it reverted to its original name, St Petersburg. Archimedes also gave a quite different proof of nearly the same proposition by a method using infinitesimals (see "How Archimedes used infinitesimals"). Most historians still agree that the most likely cause of his death was a stroke induced by the bullet still lodged in his neck from the assassination attempt. Essentially, this paragraph summarizes the proof. Also, he had no visible lesions on his body that accompany the last stages of the disease. If the first term in this series is the area of the triangle in the illustration then the second is the sum of the areas of two triangles whose bases are the two smaller secant lines in the illustration.

Although he might have had syphilis, so did a large percentage of Russians at this time. In the process, he calculated the oldest known example of a geometric series with the ratio 1/4:. In 1923, Lenin's doctors treated him with Salvarsan, the only drug at the time specifically used to treat syphilis, and potassium iodine, which was also customary at the time in treating the disease. The vertex must be so placed that the two horizontal distances mentioned in the illustration are equal.). Upon a second release of the autopsy report, none of the organs, major arteries or brain areas usually affected by syphilis were cited. "Height" means the length of the segment parallel to the axis from the vertex to the base. Abrikosov did not mention syphilis in the autopsy; however, the blood-vessel damage, the paralysis and other incapacities he cited are typical of syphilis. The "base" is any secant line, not necessarily orthogonal to the parabola's axis; "the same base" means the same "horizontal" component of the length of the base; "horizontal" means orthogonal to the axis.

Documents also suggest that Alexi Abrikosov, the pathologist in charge of the autopsy, was ordered to prove that Lenin did not die of syphilis. (See the illustration below. Documents released after the fall of the U.S.S.R, along with memoirs of Lenin's physicians, suggest that Lenin was treated for syphilis as early as 1895. He proved that the area enclosed by a parabola and a straight line is 4/3 the area of a triangle with equal base and height. For example, a posthumous diagnosis by two psychiatrists and a neurologist recently published in the European Journal of Neurology claimed to show that Lenin died from syphilis. He was the first, and possibly the only, Greek mathematician to introduce mechanical curves (those traced by a moving point) as legitimate objects of study. Therefore, several other theories regarding his death have been put forward. He did not call this ratio π but he gave a procedure to approximate it to arbitrary accuracy and gave an approximation of it as between 3 + 1/7 and 3 + 10/71.

The official cause given for Lenin's death was cerebral arteriosclerosis, or a stroke (his fourth), but out of the 27 physicians who treated him, only eight signed onto that conclusion in his autopsy report. He proved that the ratio of a circle's perimeter to its diameter is the same as the ratio of the circle's area to the square of the radius. Rumors of Lenin's syphilis sprang up shortly after his death. To what extent he actually had a correct version of integral calculus is debatable. Lenin died on January 21, 1924. He devised a heuristic method based on statistics to do private calculation that we would classify today as integral calculus, but then presented rigorous geometric proofs for his results. In March 1923 he suffered the third stroke and was left bedridden and no longer able to speak. In a civilization with an awkward numeral system and a language in which "a myriad" (literally "ten thousand") meant "infinity", he invented a positional numeral system and used it to write numbers up to 10⁶⁴.

After the second stroke in December of the same year, he resigned from active politics. In creativity and insight, he exceeded any other mathematician prior to the European Renaissance. He was left partially paralyzed (on his right side) and his role in government declined. The Greeks said that he was killed while drawing an equation in the sand, and told this story to contrast their high-mindedness with Roman ham-handedness; however, it should be noted that Archimedes designed the siege engines that devastated a substantial Roman invasion force, so his death may have been out of retribution. In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier in the sack of Syracuse during the Second Punic War, despite orders from the Roman general, Marcellus, that he was not to be harmed. The bullet was still lodged in his neck too close to his spine for medical techniques of the time to remove. After a number of experiments, whereby the hosts of the program tried burning a model wooden ship with a variety of mirrors, they concluded that the enemy ships would have had to have been virtually motionless and very close to shore for them to ignite, an unlikely scenario during a battle.

The assassination attempt earlier in his life also added to his health problems. This popular legend was tested on the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters program. Lenin's health had already been severely damaged due to the intolerable strains of revolution and war. It is said that he prevented one Roman attack on Syracuse by using a large array of mirrors (speculated to have been highly polished shields) to reflect sunlight onto the attacking ships causing them to catch fire. Of course, that was in a time of peace and order; there had not been war throughout Russia before. One of his inventions used for military defense of Syracuse against the invading Romans was the claw of Archimedes. For comparison, the worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths [6][7][8]. He has also been credited with the possible invention of the odometer during the First Punic War.

Estimates on the deaths from this famine are between 3 and 10 million. He is reputed to have held the Romans at bay with war machines of his own design; to have been able to move a full-size ship complete with crew and cargo by pulling a single rope; to have discovered the principles of density and buoyancy, also known as Archimedes' principle, while taking a bath (thereupon taking to the streets naked calling "eureka" - "I have found it!"); and to have invented the irrigation device known as Archimedes' screw. Lenin's first heart attack was in the fall of 1922; and the extent of his responsibility for the grain sales is therefore unclear, but he would certainly have been pleased. Archimedes became a popular figure as a result of his involvement in the defense of Syracuse against the Roman siege in the First and Second Punic Wars. When this was discovered, foreign relief organizations suspended aid. . The net effect, since grain is fungible, was that they received money for nothing from capitalist philanthropy. He is considered by some math historians to be one of history's greatest mathematicians, along with possibly Newton, Gauss and Euler.

The Bolsheviks permitted the relief agencies to continue distributing free food in 1923, while they sold grain abroad. Archimedes (Greek: ΑΡΧΙΜΗΔΗΣ) (287 BC–212 BC) was an Ancient mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer and philosopher born in the Greek seaport colony of Syracuse. The famine continued through 1922; the A.R.A fed ten million people, and presumably was what kept most of them alive. The Acorn Archimedes. Lenin allowed relief organizations to bring aid, this time, but later had most of the Russian members organizing the aid liquidated. Asteroid 3600 Archimedes, named in his honour. This was one of the causes of the New Economic Policy of 1921; it also helped produce an opening to the West. Archimedes crater on the Moon.

These practices and the accumulated disruptions of six and a half years of war produced a true famine in the early spring of 1921: a hunger so severe that it was doubtful that seed-grain would sown and not eaten. Given Archimedes's prodigious output as an engineer, Plutarch's often quoted comments on him seem hard to believe by modern historians. 121). It has also been suggested that this statement merely reflects the prejudices of Plutarch and his peers, influenced by Platonic beliefs in pure reasoning and deduction over experimentation and inductive processes. In 1920 Lenin ordered increased emphasis on the food requisitioning from the peasantry, at the same time that the Cheka gave detailed reports about the large scale famine (p. "...but regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest efforts only to those studies the subtlety and charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity." Plutarch, possibly explaining why Archimedes produced no writings that describe precisely the design of his inventions. 116-118. 95)¹.

92-97 and p. "Perhaps the best indication of what Archimedes truly loved most is his request that his tombstone include a cylinder circumscribing a sphere, accompanied by the inscription of his amazing theorem that the sphere is exactly two-thirds of the circumscribing cylinder in both surface area and volume!" (Laubenbacher and Pengelley, p. The war on the peasantry, including the use of poison gas, death camps, and deportations are documented on p. "The Method". 97 and p 120-121. The Sand Reckoner. The food requisitioning are documented on p. Archimedes' Cattle Problem.

The Cheka and the army began by shooting hostages, and ended by waging a second full-scale civil war against the peasantry. Stomachion. In retaliation, Lenin ordered the seizure of the food peasants had grown for their own subsistence and their seed grain. The Quadrature of the Parabola. This led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. On Floating Bodies (2 volumes). The American Relief Association, which Herbert Hoover had formed to help the starvation of WWI, offered assistance to Lenin in 1919, on condition that they have full say over the Russian railway network and hand out food impartially to all; Lenin refused this as interference in Russian internal affairs. On Conoids and Spheroids.

The Bolshevik efficiency at this is confirmed by their recently uncovered records; it is probably one cause of their victory. On the Sphere and The Cylinder. All sides in the Russian Civil Wars of 1918-20 - the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Anarchists, the seceding nationalities - provisioned themselves by the ancient method of "living off the land": they seized food from those who grew it, gave it to their armies and supporters, and denied it to their enemies. On Spirals. In total, 50,000-200,000 summary executions of "class enemies" occurred during Lenin regime. On the Equilibrium of Planes (2 volumes). 105).

There were large scale rapes of "bourgeoisie women" documented in 1920 (p. 80). In May 1919, there were 16,000 people in labor camp based on the old Tsarist katorga labor camps, in September 1921 there were more than 70,000 (p. This led to the particularly intensive period of oppression called the Red Terror.

After the assassination attempt on Lenin and the succesful assassination of Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky on the same day, Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders decided to respond with overwhelming force, both as retribution and as a deterrent for any similar future attempts. 63). Trotsky also supported starting concentration camps (p. 72-73).

(p. On the 9 and 10 of August, Lenin sent out telegrams ordering mass executions, deportations, and concentration camps. 68). In June 1918, the Cheka already had 12,000 members (p.

67). There were around 110 peasants uprisings in July and August (p. 68). Also in May, several working-class demonstrations were bloodily suppressed (p.

66). Starting in May, food was being "requisitioned" from the peasants (p. 60-61). Starting in January 1918, war prisoners were being tortured and killed on a large scale (p.

55). On November 13, an order was sent out that all who were suspected being an "enemy of the people" should be imprisoned (p. 54). The Communists started closing down independent newspaper and radio stations the day after (p.

According to the claims of the Black Book of Communism (Using the Julian calendar): The October revolution was on October 25. But the same month saw the suppression of an uprising among sailors at Kronstadt ("the Kronstadt rebellion"). In March 1921, Lenin replaced the policy of War communism (which had been used during the civil war) with the New Economic Policy (NEP), in an attempt to rebuild industry and especially agriculture. The long years of war had taken their toll on Russia, however, and much of the country lay in ruins.

However the defeat of Soviet Russia in Polish-Soviet War invalidated these plans. With revolution in Germany and Spartacist League on the rise, Lenin viewed this a perfect time and place to "to probe Europe with the bayonets of the Red Army." Lenin saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in order to link up the Russian Revolution with the communist supporters in the German Revolution, and to assist other communist movements in Western Europe. When the newly independent Second Polish Republic began securing its eastern territories annexed by Russia in the partitions of Poland in late 18th century, it clashed with Bolshevik forces for dominance in these areas, which have led to the outbreak of the Polish-Soviet War in 1919. In the later months of 1919, successes against White Russian forces convinced Lenin that it was time to spread the revolution to the West, by force if necessary.

Eventually, the Red Army won the civil war, defeating the White Russian forces and their allies in 1920 (although smaller forces remained for several more years). Foreign powers such as France, Britain, United States and Japan also intervened in this war (on behalf of the White Army). Although many different factions were involved in the civil war, the two main forces were the Red Army (communists) and the White Army (monarchists). A wide variety of political movements and their supporters took up arms to support or overthrow the soviet government.

Meanwhile, a civil war raged across Russia. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party was renamed the "Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)", which eventually became the CPSU. From that point onwards, they would be known as communists. Members of the Communist International, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks themselves, broke off from the broader socialist movement.

In March, 1919, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders met with revolutionary socialists from around the world and formed the Communist International. Lenin eventually recovered, though his health declined from this point, and it is believed that the incident contributed to his later strokes. Doctors were summoned, but decided that it was too dangerous to remove the bullets. Lenin was taken to his private apartment in the Kremlin, and refused to venture to a hospital, believing other assassins would be waiting there.

She called out to Lenin, and when he turned to answer, fired three shots, two of which struck him in the shoulder and lung. On August 30, 1918, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin after he'd spoken at a meeting and was on his way to his car. Lenin responded by (unsuccessfully) trying to shut down their activities. The situation degenerated, with non-Bolshevik parties (including some of the socialist groups) actively seeking the overthrow of the soviet government.

However, their coalition collapsed after the Social Revolutionaries opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and they joined other parties in seeking to overthrow the government of the soviets. They formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. [5]. The Bolsheviks instead opened a counter-Assembly, the third Congress of Soviets, giving themselves and their allies over 90% of the seats.

Lenin dissolved the Assembly on the same day it opened its first session. One month after the October revolution, the Bolsheviks gained 25% of the votes in the Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917. As a result of this turn of events, Lenin's position consequently gained the support of the majority in the Bolshevik leadership, and Russia signed the eventual Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under disadvantageous terms (March 1918). After the negotiations collapsed, Germany launched an invasion that resulted in the loss of much of Russia's western territory.

Leon Trotsky, who led the negotiations, advocated an intermediate position, calling for a peace treaty only on the conditions that no territorial gains on either side be consolidated. Other Bolshevik leaders, such as Bukharin, advocated continuing the war as a means of fomenting revolution in Germany. Faced with the threat of German invasion, Lenin argued that Russia should immediately sign a peace treaty. On November 8, Lenin was elected as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Soviet Congress.

Kaiser Wilhelm II himself is thought to have expected Lenin to paralyze the Russian army through revolution and end the war on the Eastern front and he saw him only as a contemporary figure that would lose power soon afterwards. Eye witnesses are said to have confirmed that Lenin had been carried in a sealed train on the way, escorted by Germans. It has been largely suggested that Lenin had reached Petrograd from Switzerland with the help of the German Empire. His ideas of government were expressed in his essay "State and Revolution" [4], which called for a new form of government based on the worker's councils, or soviets.

He returned in October, inspiring an armed revolution with the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!", against the Provisional Government. After a failed workers' uprising in July, Lenin fled to Finland for safety. However, this uncompromising stand meant that the Bolsheviks were the obvious home for the masses as they became disillusioned and with the luxury of opposition they were freed from the responsibility for any consequences from the implementation of their policies (Christopher Read: From Tsar to soviets pp151-3). Initially by this lurch to the left Lenin isolated his party.

In the April theses called for uncompromising opposition to the provisional government. On April 16, 1917, he returned to Petrograd from Switzerland following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, and took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the April Theses [3]. Inessa Armand became Lenin's partner. When Inessa Armand left Russia and settled in Paris, she met Vladimir Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile.

He continued to travel in Europe and participated in many socialist meetings and activities, including the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915. In 1907 he moved to Finland for security reasons. In 1906 he was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP. He was active in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), and in 1903 he led the Bolshevik faction after a split with the Mensheviks that was partly inspired by his pamphlet What is to be Done? [2].

At this period, he started using various aliases, finally settling upon Lenin, most likely in allusion to the Lena execution. He travelled in Russia and elsewhere in Europe and published the paper Iskra as well as other tracts and books related to the revolutionary movement. In 1900, his exile ended. In April 1899, he published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia [1].

In July 1898, he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was a socialist activist. On December 7, 1895, he was arrested and held by authorities for an entire year, then exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia. Petersburg. Rather than settle into a legal career, he became more involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts and the study of Marxism, much of it in St.

He continued to study independently and by 1891 had earned a license to practice law. This radicalized Vladimir (his official Soviet biographies have this event as central to Lenin's revolutionary exploits) and later that year he was arrested, and expelled from Kazan University for participating in student protests. The following year, in May of 1887 his eldest brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for participation in a plot threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III. Two tragedies occurred in his early life: in 1886, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Vladimir distinguished himself in the study of Latin and Greek. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) himself was baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church. He had Kalmyk ancestry through his paternal grandparents, Volga German ancestry through his maternal grandmother, who was a Lutheran, and Jewish ancestry through his maternal grandfather (converted to Christianity). Like many Russians, he was of mixed ethnic and religious ancestry.

Born in Simbirsk, Russia, Lenin was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831 - 1886), a Russian civil service official who worked for increased democracy and free universal education in Russia, and his liberal wife Maria Alexandrovna Blank (1835 - 1916). . He is sometimes erroneously referred to in the West as "Nikolai Lenin", though he has never been known as such in Russia. There are other theories on where his name came from and he himself is not known to have ever stated exactly why he chose it.

However, Plekhanov appears to have been a significant influence upon Lenin at that time in his life, so the veracity of this explanation is subject to question. Ulyanov picked the Lena which is longer and flows in the opposite direction. It has been suggested that he chose this name to show his opposition to Georgi Plekhanov who used the pseudonym Volgin, after the Volga River; i.e. "Lenin" was one of his revolutionary pseudonyms.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин  listen^?), original surname Ulyanov (Улья́нов) (April 22 (April 10 (O.S.)), 1870 – January 21, 1924), was a Russian revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik party, the first Premier of the Soviet Union, and the main theorist of Leninism, which he described as an adaptation of Marxism to "the age of imperialism".