Dmitrii Rozhanskii

Born Aug. 20 (Sept. 1), 1882, in Kiev; died Sept. 27, 1936, in Leningrad. Soviet physicist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1933.

Rozhanskii graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1904. He worked in Göttingen in 1905–06 and at the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute from 1908. From 1911 to 1921 he was a professor at the University of Kharkov; from 1921 to 1923 he was on the staff of the Nizhny Novgorod Radio Laboratory. From 1923 he worked at the Central Radio Laboratory in Leningrad and then at the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute and the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute.

In 1910, Rozhanskii proposed a method for oscillography of fast electrical processes using a Braun tube. In 1922 he developed a method for calculating the radiation from an antenna (the “induced EMF” method), and in 1933 he developed a technique for measuring dielectric constants at superhigh frequencies that was free of the shortcomings of P. Drude’s method. Rozhanskii directed work on the development of the first shortwave transmitters, on the stabilization of the frequencies generated by vacuum-tube oscillators, and on the study of the propagation of shortwave radiation. Beginning in the early 1930’s he studied electrical discharges in gases. The work on radar carried out under Rozhanskii’s direction at the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute resulted in the construction of the first Soviet pulsed radar apparatus for detection of distant aircraft. Rozhanskii founded the Soviet school of radio engineering.