ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Pyotr Ufimtsev

Pyotr Ufimtsev was a very smart man who lived a long time ago. He liked to think about things called waves that you can't see, like the way sound travels through the air or radio waves that help us listen to music on the radio.

Pyotr was very good at understanding how these waves work, especially when they bounce off of things. He came up with a way to understand how this happens using a special math called "mathematics of surfaces" which helped him figure out how to make things hard to see with radar.

Have you seen a stealth airplane before? Those guys were inspired by Pyotr's ideas! Because he helped them design special shapes for the plane that would make it hard for radar to see it. This makes it harder for the bad guys to find the airplane and try to shoot it down, so it's a very important thing Pyotr helped with.

Even though Pyotr has passed away, his ideas still help us today with things like making planes and other things that people want to keep hidden from radar.