About‍

This pro­ject gath­ers all the mech­a­nisms cre­ated by a great Russ­ian math­e­mati­cian Pafnuty Lvovich Tcheby­shev (1821—1894).

Some of them have been stored in muse­ums: twenty are in the Poly­tech­nic Museum (Moscow), twenty are in muse­ums of Saint Peters­burg State Uni­ver­sity, some are in The Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and in Sci­ence Museum (Lon­don). There are only pho­tos or descrip­tions left for some of the mech­a­nisms.

The aim of this pro­ject is to pre­serve this her­itage by con­struct­ing high-qual­ity com­puter mod­els of the mech­a­nisms that remain and recon­struct those that have dis­ap­peared accord­ing to archive doc­u­ments. By agree­ment with Muse­ums the mod­els are based on accu­rate mea­sure­ments of all the orig­i­nal para­me­ters. Any mech­a­nism should be pro­vided with exist­ing pho­tos, com­puter mod­els and a movie explain­ing how the mech­a­nisms work and show­ing it in action.

The won­der­ful design and real­iza­tion of the site has been devel­oped by Ro­man Kok­sharov. Movies that ani­mate the mod­els have been cre­ated by Michail Kalinichenko with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Alexan­dre Zhulin. Math­e­mat­i­cal com­pu­ta­tions have been done by Nikita Panyunin. Fab­ri­ca­tion of a ‍‍“Planti­grade machine” model and gen­eral orga­ni­za­tion of the pro­ject: Nikita Shavel­zon. Trans­la­tion into Eng­lish and French by Anton Fonarev and Nikita Panyunin. The orig­i­nal idea belongs to Niko­lai Andreev and has been sup­ported by Steklov Math­e­mat­i­cal Insti­tute of RAS and the Dynasty Foun­da­tion founded by Dmitry Zimin. Our thanks to the staff of muse­ums that pre­serve mech­a­nisms and doc­u­men­ta­tion and grant access to them.