Nikoloz Muskhelishvili

Nikoloz Muskhelishvili was known to many as Niko. He was also known by the Russian version of his name, namely Nikolay Ivanovich Muskhelisvili. His father, Ivan Levanovich Muskhelisvili, was a General in the Engineering Corps of the Imperial Russian Army but his ancestors were well-known historians of Georgia

Niko's childhood was spent in the village of Matsevani, near Tbilisi. After attending an elementary school, he entered the Second Tbilisi Classical Gymnasium in 1901. He spent eight years at this secondary school, graduating in 1909. Later in the same year he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the University of St Petersburg. Among his teachers at university was the Professor of Mechanics Aleksei Nikolaevich Krylov who was so impressed with the young Muskhelishvili that he said to a colleague, "Mark the name Muskhelishvili; it is one you will hear often in the future!" Muskhelishvili graduated with a first degree in 1914 and continued his studies at St Petersburg in the Department of Mechanics, preparing for a professorship. There he worked with Gury Vasilievich Kolosov who worked on the theory of elasticity and had discovered formulas expressing the components of the stress tensor and the displacement vector in terms of two analytic functions of one complex variable which he had published in his 1909 paper An application of the theory of functions of a complex variable to a planar problem in the mathematical theory of elasticity (Russian). Muskhelishvili soon was making important contributions to this area.

His first paper was On the equilibrium of circular elastic discs (Russian) (1915) written in collaboration with Kolosov

His next papers were On heat stresses in the plane problem of the theory of elasticity (Russian) (1916), On the definition of harmonic functions by means of data on a contour (Russian) (1917) and Sur l'integration de l'équation biharmonique (1917).

Before these papers were published, Muskhelishvili was working as an assistant at the St Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute where he was appointed in 1915. He worked there until 1918 but already in 1917 he was also appointed as an assistant at St Petersburg University.

After the Russian Revolution of February 1917 Georgia was ruled from St Petersburg but in May 1918 they set up an independent state. Georgia's independence was recognized by the Allies in January 1920 and there was a request to Muskhelishvili to return to his native country and help set up the state educational system. He left St Petersburg in 1920 and took up an appointment at Tbilisi State University. In addition to his appointment at Tbilisi State University, in 1921 he was appointed as a docent at Tbilisi Technical Institute. The independence of Georgia, however, was short lived for in early 1921 the Red Army entered Georgia and installed a Soviet regime.

In 1922 Muskhelishvili published his first monograph, choosing to write it in French, the important book Applications des intégrales analogues à celles de Cauchy á quelques problèmes de la physique mathématique. In the same year that this monograph was published, Muskhelishvili became a professor at Tbilisi State University. He published Sur l'équilibre des corps élastiques soumis à l'action de la chaleur (1923), The solution of an integral equation encountered in the theory of black body radiation (Russian) (1924) and in 1925 he published, jointly with George Nikoladze and Archil Kirillovich Kharadze (1895-1976), a dictionary of Russian-Georgian, Georgian-Russian mathematical terms.