Born Nikolaev, (Ukraine), 26 November/8 December 1831
Died Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1/14 May 1904
Comets, and especially the nature of their tails, were Fyodor Bredikhin’s major preoccupation throughout his entire scientific career.
After graduation in 1855 from Moscow University, Bredikhin conducted his postgraduate study there, also working at the Moscow Observatory. In 1862 he defended his master’s thesis, On the Tails of Comets, and in 1864 his doctoral dissertation, Perturbations of Comets that do not Depend on the Gravitational Attraction of Planets. The same year Bredikhin was appointed professor at Moscow University and in 1873 became director of the university’s observatory. He then succeeded Otto Wilhelm Struve , the first director of the Pulkovo Observatory, in 1890. Bredikhin retired from his observatory post in 1895, for health reasons.
Bredikhin held memberships in the Russian Astronomical Society, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina in Halle (1883), the Royal...
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Selected References
Bredikhin, Fyodor Aleksandrovich (1862). O khvostakh komet (On the tails of comets). Moscow. (This classic work was later reprinted in Russian, with a 2nd ed. edited by K. D. Pokrovsky, Moscow: Gostekhteorizdat, 1934.)
— (1954). Etyudy a meteorakh (Essays on meteors), edited by S. V. Orlov. Moscow: USSR Academy of Sciences Press. (His works on meteors were reprinted in the Russian series The Classics of Science, with an article and commentary by A. D. Dubyago.)
Nevskaya, N. I. (1964). Fedor Aleksandrovich Bredikhin (1831-1904). Moscow: Nauka. (Probably the best scientific biography of Bredikhin, with a comprehensive bibliography of all his works and over 250 secondary sources.)
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Balashov, Y. (2014). Bredikhin, Fyodor Aleksandrovich. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_200
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