Return to the Observatory

In the early 1920s, Friedmann gets the chance to return to Petrograd. In the winter he gets an invitation to take up a position as a senior research worker – a member of the Atomic Commission at the State Optical Institute – and in the spring he returns to the Main Geophysical Observatory as a senior physicist, and organizes a mathematical bureau there.

Six years before, at the very beginning of the war, Friedmann had been thinking of setting up a theoretical department in the Observatory. In his letters to B. B. Golitsyn we read: “If there is anything that gives me strength now, it's my scientific work and thinking about the Observatory and my future work in it” (May 20, 1915). “We could process computations for this problem using the Ritz method: it will be quite possible to do it in a mathematical department… By August I will probably submit to you a reasoned, at least as a first approximation, report on the mathematical department… Trying to sort out the details of the organization of a mathematical department I come across various questions of a mathematical nature” (June 25, 1915). He writes about the same to V. A. Steklov: “B. B. Golitsyn promised me, after the war is over, of course, a position as a senior physicist; he wants to put me in charge of the mathematical department which I discussed with you in the spring, and which is likely to be set up at the Observatory. It's hard to think of a better place for me” (July 25, 1915)