Saint Petersburg University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
From the fall of 1841 Kovalsky studied mathematics at Saint Petersburg University, supporting himself and his younger brother by giving private lessons. In 1845 Kovalsky graduated from the university with the degree of candidate and a gold medal for his work. In 1847 he defended his dissertation for the master’s degree, On Perturbations in the Motion of Comets.
Career
Achievements
The crater Kowalski on the Moon is named in his honor.
Membership
Russian Academy of Sciences
1863 - 1884
Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Russia
In 1863 Kovalsky was elected corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Royal Astronomical Society
1863 - 1884
Royal Astronomical Society, London, England
In 1863 Kovalsky was elected foreign member of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
Saint Petersburg University, Saint Petersburg, Russia
From the fall of 1841 Kovalsky studied mathematics at Saint Petersburg University, supporting himself and his younger brother by giving private lessons. In 1845 Kovalsky graduated from the university with the degree of candidate and a gold medal for his work. In 1847 he defended his dissertation for the master’s degree, On Perturbations in the Motion of Comets.
Marian Kowalski was a Polish-Russian astronomer. His most important work was on the analysis of the proper motion of stars and on celestial mechanics. He also served as a director of the Kazan Observatory, and dean of faculty of physics and mathematics in Kazan.
Background
Marian Kowalski was born on August 15, 1821, in Dobrzyn Nad Wisla, Congress Poland, Russian Empire (now in Poland), the elder son of a minor official. His patronymic is alternatively given as Voytekhovich or Voytsekhovich, which suggests his father's name was Wojciech.
Education
Kowalski graduated from the Gymnasium in the city of Plock in 1840. From the fall of 1841, he studied mathematics at Saint Petersburg University, supporting himself and his younger brother by giving private lessons. In 1845 Kovalsky graduated from the university with the degree of candidate and a gold medal for his work. In 1847 he defended his dissertation for the master’s degree, On Perturbations in the Motion of Comets. In 1852 he defended his doctoral dissertation Theory of the Motion of Neptune.
Working in 1846 at Pulkovo Observatory, Kovalsky made astronomical observations and calculations, in addition to studying the basic works on celestial mechanics of Laplace, Lagrange, Poisson, and P. A. Hansen.
In 1847 Kovalsky was invited by the Russian Geographical Society to join an expedition to the Urals to determine astronomical coordinates from Cherdyn to the Arctic Ocean. Over a two-year period, Kovalsky determined the coordinates of 186 geographical points and the altitudes of seventy-two points. He determined for the first time the elements of earth magnetism for five points in the Northern Urals. The result was Kovalsky’s work The Northern Urals and the Pay-Khoy Coastal Range. On the recommendation of W. Struve, director of the Pulkovo Observatory, Kovalsky was invited to Kazan as an assistant in the department of astronomy, and in September 1850 he began lecturing on astronomy and geodesy.
In 1852 he became an extraordinary professor and in 1854 ordinary professor. From 1855 he was also director of the Kazan Observatory, and from 1862 to 1868 and 1871 to 1882 he was dean of the faculty of physics and mathematics of the university.
In 1867 the first congress of the Astronomische Gesellschaft was held in Bonn; Kovalsky had participated in its organization since 1864. At this congress, it was decided to coordinate observations on the meridian circles of all stars of the well-known Bonner Durchmusterung catalog. The zone from -75° to +80° was assigned to Kazan, and Kovalsky set up an extensive program for these observations. A catalog of 4,218 stars to magnitude 9.5 was published in 1887 by D. I. Dubyago.
Kovalsky’s contributions were especially important in the areas of celestial mechanics, astronomy, and stellar astronomy. His first important work (1852) on celestial mechanics was his doctoral dissertation on the theory of motion of Neptune, the existence of which had been predicted in 1846 by Le Verrier and J. C. Adams. In 1852 Kovalsky conducted a detailed study of perturbations from the large planets, and in 1853 he obtained on the meridian circle a series of observations for a more accurate definition of the orbit of Neptune. Kovalsky’s complete theory of Neptune’s motions (1855), including positional predictions for the planet (ephemerides) served as a source for Newcomb in his reexamination (1864) of the theory of planetary motion for the entire solar system. Two other works of Kovalsky also deal with celestial mechanics: On Perturbations in the Motion of Comets and Développement de la fonction perturbatrice en série.
Theoretical astronomy was represented by Kovalsky’s work on the improvement of the elliptical orbit based on many observations by means of the method of differential corrections (1860), and by the memoir On the Determination of the Elliptical Orbit of the Planets. In this work Kovalsky uses, instead of the classical method of Gauss, the theorem of Euler-Lambert. This theorem makes it possible to obtain the major axis from a simple expression, which includes a rapidly converging series permitting any desired degree of precision in determining the unknown quantity.
Of great interest is Kovalsky’s report on the well- known Bertrand’s problem. In On Eclipses, Kovalsky substantially simplified and improved the computation of all the circumstances of solar eclipses and occultation of stars by the moon, by means of a theory that was much simpler and more precise than Bessel’s. Published only in Russian, it did not receive wide recognition. Since the advent of electronic computers, however, Kovalsky’s method for computing occultations has proved to be the most satisfactory.
Kovalsky’s analytical method of determining the elements of the orbits of double stars, presented in his official opinion on V. N. Vinogradsky’s dissertation, is also widely known. Kovalsky’s fundamental work on the theory of refraction (1878), partially based on his own observations of stars at very low altitudes over the horizon, included new tables of refraction.
Kovalsky’s important theoretical work (1860) on the analysis of the proper motion of 3,136 stars of Bradley’s catalog presented the first practical method of discovering the rotation of the Galaxy from the proper motion of the stars. Kovalsky showed the impossibility of the existence of a massive central body in the Galaxy, that is, one which would play a role analogous to that of the sun in our planetary system; J. Màdler had spoken persistently of such a central body since 1846. At the same time, Kovalsky developed a method of determining the elements of the motion of the sun in space among the stars; although this method is named after Airy, it could fairly be called the Kovalsky-Airy method. One of Kovalsky’s methods of analyzing stellar motions was the compilation of so-called polar diagrams, later used successfully by J. Karteyn in his treatment (1904) of his well-known theory of two star streams.
Membership
In 1863 Kovalsky was elected corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
Russian Academy of Sciences
,
Russia
1863 - 1884
Royal Astronomical Society
,
United Kingdom
1863 - 1884
Connections
In 1856 Kovalsky married the daughter of a Nizhny Novgorod physician, Henriette Serafimovna Gatsisskaya. Their son Alexander became an astronomer at Pulkovo.