Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mikhail Lomonosov made important contributions to chemistry, physics, astronomy, and geology. He is jointly credited with Antoine Lavoisier for discovering the law of mass conservation, observed the transit of Venus in 1761, published a catalogue of over three thousand minerals in 1745, and wrote what is considered a foundational geological work, On the Strata of the Earth, in 1763.
Lomonosov was born in the village of Mishaninskaya in Archangelgorod Governorate, on an island in the Northern Dvina river in the far north of Russia. His father, Vasily Dorofeyevich Lomonosov, was a prosperous peasant fisherman who became a ship owner transporting goods to places such as Arkhangelsk, Solovki, Kola, and Lapland.
Lomonosov has traditionally been credited with discovering the atmosphere of Venus during his 1761 transit observation near St. Petersburg. However, research by Pasachoff and Sheehan in 2012, consulting original Russian and German sources, questioned whether what Lomonosov actually saw was the atmospheric arc or instead the bright flash of the solar photosphere before third contact. The first documented observations of the actual atmospheric arc are now attributed to Chappe, Rittenhouse, Wayles, and Dymond at the June 1769 transit.
Lomonosov is considered the founder of accentual-syllabic verse in Russian poetry and his 1739 poem "Ode on the Taking of Khotin from the Turks" is called the first aesthetically indisputable example of this verse form in Russian literature. His 1755 Russian grammar distinguished Old Church Slavonic from colloquial Russian, and his 1748 work "Brief Guide to Eloquence" was the first work on rhetoric in the Russian language.
Lomonosov joined his patron Count Ivan Shuvalov in founding Moscow University in 1755. The institution was renamed M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1940, when it celebrated its 185th anniversary.
The Lomonosov Gold Medal was established in 1959 and is awarded annually by the Russian Academy of Sciences to one Russian scientist and one foreign scientist. It is named in honor of Mikhail Lomonosov.