Yuri Andropov
There has been much contention over his family background. According to the official biography, Andropov was born in stanitsa Nagutskaya (modern-day Stavropol Krai of Russia) on 15 June 1914. His father Vladimir Konstantinovich Andropov was a railway worker of Don Cossack descent who died from typhus in 1919. His mother Yevgenia Karlovna Fleckenstein (none of the official sources mentioned her name) was a school teacher who died in 1931. She was born in the Ryazan Governorate into a family of town dwellers and was abandoned on the doorstep of a Finnish citizen, a Jewish watchmaker Karl Franzevich Fleckenstein who lived in Moscow; he and his wife Eudokia Mikhailovna Fleckenstein adopted and raised her. Later researches has shown that many details about Andropov's biography were largely falsified during his lifetime which has contributed to the confusion connected to his family history.
Yury Osipov
Osipov was born in Tobolsk (in present-day Tyumen Oblast, Russia). In 1959 he graduated from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Ural State University (Yekaterinburg, Russia). His teacher was Nikolai Krasovsky, famous scientist and founder of the Ural scientific school in mathematical theory of control and the theory of differential games. From 1961 to 1969 he worked at the Ural State University. From 1970 to 1993 he worked at the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Ural Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences (later, of the Russian Academy of Sciences) in Yekaterinburg (from 1986 to 1993 he was the chief of the Institute). In 1971 he defended his second thesis and received the rank of professor in 1973. In 1984 he was elected corresponding member and in 1987, full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Division of Machine Engineering, Mechanics and Control Processes Problems).