Victor Ivanovich Shestakov (Russian: Виктор Иванович Шестаков) (1907–1987) was a Russian/Soviet logician and theoretician of electrical engineering.
Shestakov proposed a theory of electric switches based on Boolean logic earlier than Claude Shannon (according to certification of Soviet logicians and mathematicians Sofya Yanovskaya, M. G. Gaaze-Rapoport, Roland Dobrushin, Oleg Lupanov, Yu.
[clarification needed] Every relay circuit schema for practical use was a distinct invention, because the general principle of simulation of these systems was not known.
[citation needed] Shestakov's credit (and independently later Claude Shannon's) is the general theory of logical simulation, inspired by the rapidly increasing complexity of technical demands.
Resistance of these elements could take arbitrary values on the real-number line, and upon the two-element set {0, ∞} this degenerates into the bivalent Boolean algebra of logic.