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First human in space, Yuri Gagarin.

budget to nuclear power and industry development before 2015. Russia remains among the world leaders in nuclear technology and is a member of ITER international fusion reactor project.

Science and technology

At the start of the 18th century the reforms of Peter the Great (the founder of Russian Academy of Sciences and Saint Petersburg State University) and the work of such champions as polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (the founder of Moscow State University) gave a great boost for development of science and innovation in Russia.

In the 19th and 20th centuries the country produced a large number of great scientists and inventors.

In mathematics Nikolai Lobachevsky, a Copernicus of Geometry, founded the non-Euclidean geometry. At least after such prominent scientist as Chebyshev the Russian mathematical school became one of the most influential ones in the world and was represented by numerous figures greatly contributing to different fields of mathematics, physics and computing sciences. Chebyshev's students included Aleksandr Lyapunov who founded the modern stability theory (lately deeply developed by such scientists as Aleksandr Andronov and Vladimir Arnold), and Andrey Markov who developed the theory of Markov chains, playing a central role in information sciences and modern applied mathematics. Nikolai Zhukovsky was a founding father of the modern aero- and hydrodynamics. Andrei Kolmogorov, a leading mathematician of the 20th century, developed the modern theory

of probability and made other major contributions to broadest range of mathematical branches, including turbulence, topology and information theory. Israel Gelfand is credited with many important discoveries in mathematical physics and applied sciences. Sergei Sobolev developed a theory of Sobolev space which played an extremely important role in formation of modern mathematical views and introduced a notion of distributions generalyzing ideas of Newton and Leibniz. Yevgraf Fyodorov was a founder of modern crystallography. Nicolai Vasiliev was a forerunner of paraconsistent and multi-valued logics. Such mathematicians as Pavel Alexandrov, Lev Pontryagin, Andrey Tychonoff, and many others made fundamental contributions to different fields of mathematics. Nine Soviet/Russian mathematicians were awarded with Fields Medal, a most prestigious