He graduated in 1890 from Moscow University, and later became a professor. He taught mechanical engineering at Moscow Higher Courses for Women in 1901, and of applied mathematics at Moscow School of Technology, 1903. He was appointed Director of the courses in 1905. Leonid I. Sedov was one of his students.
Chaplygin was born to Aleksei Timofeevich Chaplygin, a shop assistant, and Anna Petrovna in Ranenburg (present day Chaplygin), Russia. After his father died when he was 2 years old, his mother remarried a tradesman and they moved to Voronezh. There, he attended the Voronezh Gymnasium, which he graduated in 1886.[1]
Soon after, he attended the Moscow University, specializing in Physics and Mathematics, which he graduated from in 1890. There he met and was strongly influenced by Nikolai Egorovich Zhukovsky. In 1893, he published his first work, On certain cases of the motion of a solid body in a fluid, for which he received the N. D. Brashman Award.[2]
After graduating from the university, he went on to become a professor there. In 1897, he published On the motion of a heavy body of revolution in a horizontal plane,[3] which was the first to present the general equation of motion of a nonholonomic system. This equation is a generalisation of Lagrange's equation. In 1899, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
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