Alexander Abian

Alexander Abian (January 1, 1923 - July 24, 1999), also known as Smbat Abian, was an Iranian-Armenian American mathematician and faculty professor of mathematics at Iowa State University, popularly known for his advocacy of altering the Earth's orbit (by destroying the Moon using nuclear weapons) for the benefit of humanity, and for his "Big Suck" Theory of cosmic origins.

Background
Smbat Abian was born in January 1923 at Tabriz, a city in the East Azerbaijan province of Iran. After completing his schooling and earning an undergraduate degree in Iran, Abian emigrated to the United States in 1952, where he completed a master's degree at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati (for his dissertation, "Invariants and Covariants of Systems of Linear Differential and Integro-Differential Equations"). Through the course of his career in mathematics, Abian authored three books and published over two hundred papers.

Radical Cosmism and the Moonless Earth

 * "ALTER EARTH'S ORBIT AND TILT - STOP GLOBAL DISASTERS AND EPIDEMICS. ALTER THE SOLAR SYSTEM. REORBIT VENUS INTO A NEAR EARTH-LIKE ORBIT TO CREATE A BORN AGAIN EARTH (1990)."

In the early 1990s, a short while prior to his retirement from the Iowa State University, Abian began publicly speaking out about his theories on means of improving the conditions of earth, in particular advocating for the re-engineering of the solar system, calling the current gravitational alignment of the planets "perverse, peevish and criminal." One means of such improvement, Abian proposed, was to detonate nuclear weapons inside the Moon, which would, by his reckoning, obliterate it, and cause the axis of the Earth to shift in such a way that all the inhabited areas will receive equal solar coverage, and that removing the Moon's gravitational influence would radically improve the planetary climate.

Abian's theories were met with minor media attention, and most reactions were of a skeptical nature.



Resources

 * Abian's University of Iowa homepage: http://www.math.iastate.edu/abian/homepage.html (archive.org)
 * Interview with Alexander Abian on "Ordinary Iowa" (youtube.com): Part I, Part II