VALENTIN VALENTINOVICH VEDERNIKOV *

(1904-1980)

Valentin Valentinovich Vedernikov, doctor of technical science (Russian/Soviet terminology) [this is a step above PhD in Western countries], graduated from Don's Polytechnical Institute (City of Novocherkassk, Rostov Oblast Region) in 1928. He worked at the State Institute of Agricultural Land Reclamation, as well as in various water management organizations of the Northern Caucasus Region and Turkestan (presently in Middle Asia). In 1934 he published a book entitled "Seepage from channels" in which he used a method of conformal images for non-pressurized steady motion of ground water in a vertical plane. In this book he used the method of Vedernikov-Pavlovskiy for the first time. The latter is based on conformal imaging of flow regions in the plane of complex potential of velocity of seepage and the Zhukovkiy complex function (N. N. Pavlovkiy discovered the same method at the same time, independently of Vedernikov, but published it at a later date).

In 1935 Vedernikov was granted the Ph.D. without defending his dissertation; in 1938 he defended his dissertation and received the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences. The findings of V. V. Vedernikov were summarized in the book entitled "Theory of seepage and its use in the fields of irrigation and drainage" (1939).

In 1940-1941, Vedernikov was chair of the Department of Hydraulics and Hydro-machinery at the Moscow Institute of Turf. In 1941-1942 he was working in the Institute of Mechanics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Beginning in 1943, he worked at the Section of Scientific Research in Hydraulics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Since 1947 he was chair of the Department of Hydraulics of the Soviet Union's Energy Distance-Learning Institute. In 1945-1947, Vedernikov, theoretically and later experimentally, explained the phenomenon of unsteady flow of water in channels with roll wave formation, defining the criterion for the instability of flow. In this endeavor, he used the Saint-Venant equations of unsteady open-channel flow. In the literature of hydraulic engineering, his concept is referred to as the Vedernikov number. His research helped to advance the knowledge of the theory of seepage, as well as the design and construction of hydraulic and irrigation/drainage structures.

* This short biography of Prof. V. V. Vedernikov was prepared by Aleksandr Gostomelskiy, using original sources. The assistance of Prof. Dmitriy Vyacheslavovich Kozlov, chair of the Department of Hydraulics and Hydraulic Construction at Moscow State University of Construction, is greatly appreciated.