Gavriil Suslov

Born July 2 (14), 1857; died Nov. 19,1935. Soviet scientist in mechanics.

Suslov graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1880 and remained at the university to prepare for the professorship. In 1888 he became a professor at the University of Kiev and simultaneously taught at the Kiev Women’s Courses, which he headed from 1910. In 1919 he became a professor at the Odessa Polytechnic Institute; he later became rector of the institute.

Suslov’s main works are devoted to problems of virtual work for systems with constraints of the most general type, extension of the Hamilton-Ostrogradskii form of the principle of least action to the case of nonholonomic systems, the mechanics of holonomic systems, and the dynamics of rigid bodies. His main research is summarized in the basic course Fundamentals of Analytical Mechanics (vols. 1–2,1899–1902).