School No. 444 () is a state school in Moscow, Russia, in the Izmaylovo district of the Eastern Administrative Okrug. It was one of the first schools in Moscow to offer in-depth study of mathematics and is also known for its school museum of the Brest Fortress, named after the fortress's commissar Yefim Fomin. The school was twice named "School of the Year of Russia" (1997 and 1998) and received the "School of the Century" diploma in 2001.
History The school was founded in 1953. Its five-storey brick building was constructed to a standard design by the architect L. A. Stepanova. In 1959 the mathematics educator S. I. Shvartsburd established at School No. 444 one of the first specialized mathematics classes in the Soviet Union — training "programmer-computers" — which began the school's transformation into a physics-and-mathematics school. A profile in the educational outlet Newtonew has called it "the mother of physics-and-mathematics schools". It subsequently developed as a physics-and-mathematics "laboratory school" with in-depth study of mathematics and computer science.
Programming and computing centre Building on the mathematics classes created by Shvartsburd, School No. 444 became one of the first schools in the USSR to teach pupils computer programming systematically. In 1962 the computing centre of the Central Research Institute of Complex Automation (TsNIIKA), whose building stood next to the school, was brought into the pupils' practical training, giving senior pupils access to real computers. Lessons began on keyboard calculating machines; the first computer the pupils worked on was a Ural installed in the school building. Later they learned programming on M-20 and BESM-4, ES-1033, Agat, Yamaha and IBM PC machines.
Brest Fortress school museum In 1958, following the writer S. S. Smirnov's account of the heroic defence of the Brest Fortress, the school became one of the first in Moscow to take an interest in the history of its defenders. The school's head V. D. Golovina, her deputy Yu. A. Aleksandrovsky, the mathematics teacher Ya. S. Chernyak and the physical-education teacher N. N. Kosarev travelled with pupils to Brest; the items they brought back formed the basis of an exhibition and then of a school museum headed by Chernyak. The museum received official status in 1975, and in 1996 it was named after the Brest Fortress commissar E. M. Fomin.
Rankings School No. 444 regularly appears in the rankings of Moscow's best schools compiled by the city's Department of Education on the basis of educational results, and in recent years has been placed in the top group (positions 1–20).
Notable people Teachers Naum Yakovlevich Vilenkin (1920–1991), mathematician Semyon Shvartsburd (1918–1996), mathematics educator, creator of the school's first mathematics class Yakov Samoylovich Chernyak (1933–2010), mathematics teacher, founder and long-time head of the school's Brest Fortress museum Mikhail Shishkin (born 1961), writer, who taught German and English at the school
Alumni Arkady Dvorkovich, statesman, president of FIDE Daniil Dubov, chess grandmaster Alexander Zhukov, statesman Lev Zelenyi, physicist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Andrei Movchan, economist and financier Andrei Nemzer, literary critic Anatoly Kushnirenko, computer scientist and educator
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