Mikhail Subbotin

Mikhail Fedorovich Subbotin (, 29 June 1893 – 26 December 1966) was a Soviet mathematician and astronomer who calculated orbits of planets and comets. He worked on general properties of motion in the n-body problem.

Biography and education Subbotin was born on 29 June 1893 in Ostrolenka, Russian Empire (now Ostrołęka, Poland). His father was Fedor Subbotin, who was an army officer.

Mikhail Fedorovich Subbotin studied in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Warsaw in 1910 and graduated in 1914. He had an interest in astronomy, and worked as a calculator at the university observatory. After graduating he continued on as a junior astronomer.

In 1915, the University of Warsaw was evacuated to Rostov-on-Don after the German army invaded Poland, and Subbotin completed his master's degree there in 1917. During this time he also published two papers, “On the determination of singular points of analytic functions” and another on singular points of certain differential equations. He then moved to the Donskoy Polytechnic Institute (Novocherkassk) where he was appointed a professor of mathematics. In 1922, he accepted an offer to work at the Central Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences as Director in Tashkent. On 6 June 1945 Subbotin received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. In 1963 he was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Works Subbotin started his career working on the theory of functions and probability. He worked on the creation of a catalog of faint stars. “... Subbotin not only showed the possibility of improving the convergence of the trigonometric series by which the behaviour of perturbing forces is represented, but also gave an expression for determining Laplace coefficients and presented formulas for computing the coefficients of the necessary members of the trigonometric series.” Subbotin wrote a three-volume work called “Course in Celestial Mechanics" (1933–49), in which for the first time in Russian the main questions of celestial mechanics were described in detail.