by Acad. Yevgeny VELIKHOV, President of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute", Moscow Anatoly Petrovich Alexandrov conjures up the image of Noah, a biblical patriarch who built an ark, in which he survived the Flood. Alexandrov, in fact, survived two floods... He came to us from the Silver Age of the early 20th century, a period of the great intellectual upsurge of Russia, of the efflorescence of her science, culture, literature and arts, a period of her booming industrial growth. Such precious character traits as inquisitiveness, decency and good will were part and parcel of his moral fabric. "The more you give, the more you take on the rebound." Alexandrov was clearly conscious of this abiding truth. стр. 49 Born in the Ukraine in 1903, Alexandrov was a Kiev University graduate (Department of Physics and Mathematics).* He combined his regular university course with school teaching. While still there, in Kiev, he caught attention of Abram Ioffe, director of the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology (LFTI)**, who was eager to enlist young gifted men to his fold. Alexandrov was among them. This happened in 1930. This is how Alexandrov turned up at LFTI. His first works over there dealt with the breakdown of dielectrics, demonstrating that the breakdown strength of thin films did not depend on their thickness and thus dashing the then current theory of solid state collision ionization. He pointed to the essential "weal points" of dielectrics, a finding that proved to be fruitful in subsequent studies, in particular, in what concerned the brittle failure of materials. This gave birth to the statistical brittle strength theory; evolved and validated experimentally, it still holds in the present physical theory of materials longevity. * See: N. Ponomarev-Stepnoi, "At the Head of the Nuclear Branch", Science in Russia, No. 2, 2003.--Ed. ** See: B. Dyakov, "Fiztekh: a Multidimensional View", Science in Russia,  ... Читать далее