Otto Yulyevich Shmidt (born Otto Friedrich Julius Schmidt; – 7 September 1956), better known as Otto Schmidt, was a Soviet scientist, mathematician, astronomer, geophysicist, statesman, and academician. Biography He was born in the town of Mogilev in the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus. His father was a descendant of German settlers in Courland, while his mother was a Latvian. In 1912-13 while in university he published a number of mathematical works on group theory which laid foundation for Krull–Schmidt theorem. In 1913, Schmidt married Vera Yanitskaia and graduated from the Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev, where he worked as a privat-docent starting from 1916. In 1918 he became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (internationallists) which was later dissolved in to the Russian Communist Party (b). After the October Revolution of 1917, he was a board member at several People's Commissariats (narkomats)such as Narkomprod from 1918 to 1920 (Narodnyi Komissariat Prodovolstviya, or People's Commissariat for Supplies), People's Commissariat for Finance from 1921 to 1922 (Narodnyi Komissariat Finansov, or People's Commissariat for Finances). Schmidt was one of the chief proponents of developing the higher education system, publishing, and science in Soviet Russia. He worked at Narkompros (People's Commissariat for Education), the State Scientific Board at the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, and the Communist Academy. He was Chair of the Foreign Literature Committee from October 1921. Following the Litkens Commission Schmidt was also employed as the director of the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) from 1921 to 1924, and chief editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia from 1924 to 1941. From 1923 he was a professor at the Second Moscow State University and later at the Moscow State University, and from 1930 to 1932, Schmidt was the head of the Arctic Institute. From 1932 to 1939, he was appointed head of Glavsevmorput' (Glavnoe upravlenie Severnogo Morskogo Puti) – an establishment that oversaw all commercial operations on the Northern Sea Route. From 1939 to 1942, Schmidt became a vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he organized the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics (he was its director until 1949). Otto Schmidt was a founder of the Moscow Algebra School, which he directed for many years. In the mid-1940s, Schmidt suggested a new cosmogonical hypothesis on the formation of the Earth and other planets of the Solar System, which he continued to develop together with a