Mikhail Alexandrovich Leontovich

Mikhail Leontovich ( Russian Михаил Александрович Леонтович , English transcription Mikhail Alexandrovich Leontovich * February 22 ^jul. / 7. March  1903 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 20th March 1981 in Moscow ) was a Soviet physicist who worked mainly in theory, but also experimental. He worked in many areas of physics, but is best known as the founder of a school of theorists on controlled nuclear fusion in the Soviet Union.

His father Alexander Wassiljewitsch Leontowitsch (1869-1943) was a well-known physiologist and neurohistologist, professor at the University of Kiev and from 1913 in Moscow at the Petrowsko-Rasumowski Agricultural Institute and later a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The father of his mother Vera Viktorovna was the engineer Viktor Kirpichev . Leontowitsch became interested in chemistry, geology and mathematics at an early age and studied from 1919 at Lomonossow University . As a student he worked for the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly Institute until 1925. He became (with his fellow students Witt , Andronow and Chaikin ) a student of Leonid Isaakowitsch Mandelstam , where he dealt with molecular optics and crystal optics. In 1928 he received his doctorate and in 1935 his habilitation (Russian doctorate), the latter without submitting a dissertation due to his previous publications. He became a professor at Lomonosov University. With Sergei Iwanowitsch Wawilow he led optics courses. During the Second World War he was researching radio control systems for aircraft and radar, and theoretically dealt with electromagnetic waves and the propagation of radio waves. After World War II he became head of the laboratory for vibration research at the Lebedev Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences . From 1946 to 1954 he taught at the Moscow Institute for Technical Physics ( MEPhI ). From 1951 Leontowitsch was head of the theory department for research on controlled nuclear fusion at the Kurchatov Institute . From 1955 to 1971 he held the chair for electrodynamics and quantum theory at Lomonosov University.

In addition to plasma physics, he also dealt with the theory of vibrations, physical optics, acoustics (areas that are called radio physics in the Soviet Union ), statistical physics and thermodynamics.

In 1958 he received the Lenin Prize , three times the Order of Lenin and five times the Order of the Red Banner of Labor .

In 1955 he was one of the signatories of the letter of the 300 for the deposition of Lyssenko . In 1966 he signed a letter to the Soviet leadership who opposed the rehabilitation of Stalin and he stood up for Soviet dissidents, for example in 1966 he signed a petition from Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov for Yuri Galanskow and Alexander Ginsburg .

He was a corresponding member since 1939 and a full member since 1946 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

literature

• Centennial of Academician MA Leontovich , Plasma Physics Reports, Volume 29, 2003, pp. 187-189

Fonts

• Introduction to Thermodynamics , Berlin, Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften 1953
• Editor: Plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion , Pergamon Press 1959, 1961

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary in the New York Times 1981