[3] Ary Abramovich Sternfeld was born 14 May 1905 in the city of Sieradz in Poland, then in Kalisz Governorate of Russian Empire, near Łódź, into a merchant family.
From a young age he displayed wonderful memory, a good imagination and a sharp mind.
After graduating from the gymnasium, Ari entered the school of philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
He left for France, in order to have the means to study not just natural science, but also engineering.
He enrolled in École nationale supérieure d'électricité et de mécanique (ENSEM) in Nancy.
For several months until the school year started, he worked all day, starting in the famous Parisian market The Belly of Paris, later in the day in the factory Reno, and he did not have the means to learn French so he worked among immigrants.
Despite the daily struggle, he was cheerful, sociable, curious and successfully entered his second year.
He later wrote, "My colleagues, the dreams and schemes that I plotted between lectures seemed to me incurable fantasies...in those days, to fly across the Atlantic Ocean became a sensation, and here to possess the power to control the universe..." After three years of selfless labour and tireless study, he became an engineer.
In 1928 Sternfeld studied for a doctorate in Sorbonne in order to work on a dissertation about spaceflight.
There he collected materials on the history and technology of rocketry, questions about flight mechanics, and calculated the trajectories of machines in space.
In 1931, when all was said and done for Sternfeld's dissertation, his advisor stated that he would not be responsible for a research topic so far removed from reality.
The advisor requested that he change the topic for an elevated stipend, but no Earthly good could stop Sternfeld from perusing his childhood dream.
She ultimately edited his scientific work in French, Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish.
The first book that he read in Russian was Tsiolkovsky's Plan of Space Exploration (Исследование мировых пространств реактивными приборами).
11 June 1930 Sternfeld wrote a letter to Tsiolkovsky with a request to send his work.
19 August 1930 the French magazine L’Humanité published Sternfeld's article "From Yesterday's Utopia to Today's Reality".
He wrote in French the monograph "Introduction to Cosmonautics" (Initiation à la Cosmonautique).
"This was the first systematic summary of the population of the problems in communication with the upcoming conquest of space, from the building of the solar system to the relativistic effects on spaceflight."
Starting in 1935, he worked for the Institute of Reactive Scientific Research [Реактивного научно-исследовательского института]).