Born Nikolayev (Mykolayiv, Ukraine), 11/23 April 1896
Died Leningrad (Saint Petersburg, Russia), 12 August 1964
Dmitry Maksutov was a Soviet optician who is credited as a leading designer of astronomical optical instruments after World War II. A graduate (1913) of cadet school, he was enrolled in the Military Engineering College of Saint Petersburg, but his study was interrupted by World War I. Like other members of his family, he fought in that conflict, and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, attempted to immigrate to the United States through China but failed. Maksutov continued his education at the Tomsk Technical Institute (Siberia) and worked in Saint Petersburg and Odessa, Ukraine, where in 1930 he was arrested but miraculously survived while every other randomly chosen “suspect” was shot. He was arrested for a second time during Stalin's Great Terror in 1937.
From 1930 to 1952, Maksutov worked in the State Optical Institute (Leningrad), where he founded and headed the...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Selected References
Kopal, Z. (ed.) (1956). Proceedings of a Symposium on Astronomical Optics and Related Subjects Held in the University of Manchester April 19–22, 1955. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Maksutov, D. D. (1954). Technologie der astronomischen Optik. Berlin: Verlag Technik.
——— (1984). Manufacturing and Investigation of Astronomical Optics (in Russian). 2nd ed. Moscow: Nauka.
Petrunin, Yuri and Eduard Trigubov (2001). “Dmitri Maksutov: The Man and His Telescopes.” Sky & Telescope 102, no. 6: 52–58.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Gurshtein, A.A. (2007). Maksutov, Dmitry Dmitrievich. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_892
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_892
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-31022-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-30400-7
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyReference Module Physical and Materials ScienceReference Module Chemistry, Materials and Physics