Anatoly Alexandrov (physicist)

Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov (13 February 1903, Tarashcha – 3 February 1994, Moscow), also known as A.P Alaexandrov, was a Soviet and Russian physicist, director of the Kurchatov Institute, academician (from 1953) and president of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1975–1986).

Early life

Anatoly Alexandrov was born on 13 February 1903 into the family of a prominent judge in the town of Tarashcha, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (now located in modern-day Ukraine).

In 1919, at the height of the Russian Civil War, Alexandrov graduated from high school in Kiev. The certificate gave the right to enter the university at the physics and mathematics or medical faculty. When the Red Army captured Kiev on February 5, 1919, Alexandrov and a friend were at a dacha in Mlynka. He and his friend encountered an officer of White Guard, who urged them to enlist. They went to the front with the officer.

At the age of 16, he became a cadet and fought in the Army of Wrangel as a machine gunner, and was awarded three Crosses of St. George. During the evacuation of remnants of the White Guard army from Crimea to Turkey, Alexandrov refused to leave and preferred to stay. As a result, he was captured and sentenced to death, but he narrowly escaped.

Scientific career

Anatoly Alexandrov (1931)

Later he worked as an assistant at the Kiev Mining Institute as an electrician. He later worked as an electrical engineer at the Kiev Physicochemical Society under the Political Education and a high school teacher in the village of Belki, Kiev region. For several years, he combined his studies at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Kiev University, where he studied from 1924 to 1930, with teaching physics and chemistry at school#79 in Kiev.

After graduating from Faculty of Physics in Kiev University in 1930, he worked at the X-ray Physics Department in the Kiev Institute of Health. After his graduation in 1930, he was invited by Abram Ioffe to join him in Leningrad. At Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute, he developed a statistical theory of strength and doctoral dissertation - "Relaxation in Polymers" (1941).

From the spring of 1931, he worked at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, where he became a candidate, and then a professor of physical and mathematical sciences.