The birthplace of Andrey Petrovich Kiselyov is the town of Mtsensk which was mentioned for the first time in the chronicles of 1174. Nowadays it is a small district center in the Oryol region. It used to be a center of grain trade when A.P. Kiselyov was born into a petty bourgeois family on December 12, 1852. He had two brothers and three sisters. After the death of his father the family lived under straitened circumstances. Remembering his childhood and youth A.P. Kiselyov stressed that he had started giving lessons because of their poverty and his desire to help the family. A.P.Kiselyov started his studying to write, read and compute numbers at one of several people’s schools which had only two dass-rooms and 150 books of 22 titles, 3 icons, 1 book case, 4 desks. In a year he became a student of one of two district schools where he was taught more subjects: Religion, the Russian Language, Arithmetics, Geometry, Geography, Concise Russian and World History, Arts, Technical Drawing. He started both studying and teaching in his native town. He taught his neighbour to write, read, compute numbers for 2 pounds of sugar and a package of tea a month. What is more he got fascinated with Mathematics which was for him the only means to comprehend reality and not a kind of abstraction.

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