Biography: Mikhail Lomonosov
Although relatively unknown in the Western World, Mikhail Lomonosov was one of the most prominent figures of the Russian Enlightenment. Lomonosov was born on November 19, 1711 in Kholmogory, Russia. His parents were considered peasants, and his mother died when he was young. His stepmother resented her stepson’s intelligence and reading ability, and attempted to get him to stop reading all the books in the village. She sided with the belief in Russia at the time that children were born to be a help to their parents, and though that Lomonosov should have been helping his father instead of reading.
When Lomonosov was 19 years old, he could no longer find the means to educate himself in the village where he was born. He ran away to Moscow, to pursue his dream of pursuing an education in the sciences. He was admitted to a top boarding school and had to keep his background secret since, older that all the other students by four years, he was only admitted due to the belief he was the son of a great nobleman. However, it wasn’t long before he distinguished himself in his studies, completing an eight year course in Latin, geography, history, philosophy, Greek and Slovonic in half the time. It was only his incredible aptitude for learning and distinguished record that prevented him from being expelled when his father arrived to ask him to return home and his true parentage was discovered. When he was 25 years old, he was one of the top 12 students in the school, and was asked to enroll in the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
The Academy was in a financial crisis when Lomonosov arrived and despite being State supported with the charter of educating the top scientific minds in Russia, the school consisted primarily of foreign instructors and students. Lomonosov was elected to the faculty in 1945 and worked to increase the number of Russian student and faculty at the school along with increasing the number of lectures given in Russian as opposed to Greek or Latin.
Lomonosov became known for strengths in both theory and experimental methods, designing his own experiments to support his ideas. He was thirst to use experimental process to confirm the law of conservation of matter, first observed by Boyle in 1673. Lomonosov went on to distinguish himself in the areas of physics, chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, geology, geography, economics, philosophy and prose and he became a renown historian and poet. A true renaissance man before his time, Lomonosov died in 1765 at the age of only 54.
