Anatoly Fomenko

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Anatoly Fomenko was born on 13 March 1945 in Stalino, USSR (now Donetsk), to Timothy Grigorievich Fomenko, an industrial engineer, and Valentina Polikarpovna Markova, a philologist and teacher of Russian language and literature. His parents would later co-author his works on New Chronology in 1983 and 1996. He was raised and schooled in Magadan. In 1959, his family returned to Eastern Ukraine and settled in Luhansk, where Fomenko attended Secondary School No. 26. During secondary school, he participated in many mathematics competitions and won several medals. Also in 1959, the magazine Pionerskaya Pravda published his first known science fiction story, 'The Mystery of the Milky Way.' He graduated from the Mechanics and Mathematics Department of Moscow State University in 1967. In 1969, he began studying differential geometry in the same department. He defended his thesis 'Classification of totally geodesic manifolds realizing nontrivial cycles in Riemannian homogeneous spaces' in 1970, and his doctoral thesis 'The decision of the multidimensional plateau problems on Riemannian manifolds' in 1972. In December 1981, he became a professor of Higher Geometry and Topology, and in 1992, was appointed as head of Differential Geometry and Applications in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at Moscow State University.

Reader's Guide

Fomenko's mathematical work includes developing the theory of topological invariants of an integrable Hamiltonian system. He is the author of 180 scientific publications and 26 textbooks (including monographs) on mathematics, specializing in geometry and topology, variational calculus, symplectic topology, Hamiltonian geometry and mechanics, and computational geometry. He has served as editor of several Russian-language mathematics journals and won the State Prize of the Russian Federation for excellence in mathematics in 1996. He is a full member (Academician) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1994), the International Higher Education Academy of Sciences (1993), and the Russian Academy of Technological Sciences (2009), and a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (1991). However, he is also one of the authors of a concept that manipulates historical chronology called New Chronology. He claims to have discovered new empirico-statistical methods and applied them to show many historical events are misdated. He asserts that ancient history (including Greece, Rome, and Egypt) merely reflects medieval events, while Chinese and Arab histories are fabrications by 17th- and 18th-century Jesuits. He claims Jesus lived in the 12th century A.D. and was crucified on Joshua's Hill; that the Trojan War and the Crusades were the same event; that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were actually Russians; and that the lands west of the Thirteen Colonies were part of a 'Siberian-American Empire' until 1775. He also disputes scientific dating techniques such as dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. Most Russian scientists and worldwide historians consider his historical works to be either pseudoscientific or antiscientific.

Did You Know?

• Fomenko's first known science fiction story, 'The Mystery of the Milky Way,' was published in the magazine Pionerskaya Pravda in 1959.
• His parents co-authored his works on New Chronology in 1983 and 1996.
• He won the State Prize of the Russian Federation for excellence in mathematics in 1996.
• Fomenko claims that Jesus lived in the 12th century A.D. and was crucified on Joshua's Hill.
• He is a painter and illustrator whose artwork often depicts objects from mathematics, many related to topology.