Boris Hessen
Boris Mikhailovich Hessen (), also Gessen (16 August 1893, Elisavetgrad – 20 December 1936, Moscow), was a Soviet physicist, philosopher and historian of science. He is most famous for his paper on Newton's "Principia" which became foundational in historiography of science. Biography. Boris Hessen was born to a Jewish family in Elisavetgrad, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine). He studied physics and natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh (1913—1914) together with his gymnasium school friend Igor Tamm. He then went to study at the St. Petersburg University (1914—1917). He enlisted in the Red  Army in the Russian Civil War, joined the Communist Party in 1919 and became a member of the Revolutionary Military Council (1919—1921) and worked at the Party School. He also continued his physics studies at various places eventually graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow in 1928. In this year he was criticised by Alexander Maximov, who criticised him for being a "machist" and "right deviationist". After working in the institute for two more years, he became a physics professor and the chair of the physics department at the Moscow State University in 1931. In 1933 he was  elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1931, Hessen delivered his famous paper ""The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia"" at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London. This work became foundational in the history of science and led to modern studies of scientific revolutions and sociology of science. From 1934 to 1936 Hessen was a deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow headed by S.I. Vavilov. On 22 August 1936 Hessen was arrested by the NKVD. He was secretly tried for terrorism by a military tribunal together with his gymnasium  school teacher Arkadij O. Apirin. They were found guilty on 20 December 1936 and were executed by shooting the same day. On 21 April 1956 both Apirin and Hessen were "rehabilitated" (posthumously exonerated).