Alexander Abian


Alexander Abian was an American mathematician who taught for over 25 years at Iowa State University and became notable for his frequent posts to various Usenet newsgroups, and his advocacy for the destruction of the moon.

Life

Abian was born in Tabriz, Iran, and was of Armenian ethnicity. After earning an undergraduate degree in Iran, he emigrated to the United States in 1950, where he received a master's degree from the University of Chicago. Abian then obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati, where he wrote a dissertation on a topic in invariant theory under the direction of Isaac Barnett. After teaching posts in Tennessee, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, he joined the faculty of Iowa State in 1967. He wrote three books and published more than two hundred papers. He retired in 1993.

Moonless Earth theory

Abian gained a degree of international notoriety for his claim that blowing up the Moon would solve virtually every problem of human existence. He made this claim in 1991 in a campus newspaper, stating that a Moonless Earth wouldn't wobble, eliminating both the seasons and its associated events like heat waves, snowstorms and hurricanes. Abian said that "Those critics who say 'Dismiss Abian's ideas' are very close to those who dismissed Galileo."
The proposed nuclear destruction of the Moon is criticized for 1. a likely failure of deep nuclear explosions to do more than crack the Moon, 2. if successful, heating of Earth's atmosphere by a hail of falling lunar debris, destructive to all life, and 3. an increase, not decrease, in the Earth's wobble without a stabilizing Moon, leading to an Earth axial tilt of 45 degrees and more drastic seasons.

Books