Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov

Who is Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov?

Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov is a Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist.

Novikov formulated the Novikov self-consistency principle in the mid-1980s, an important contribution to the theory of time travel.

Novikov gained his Ph.D. degree in astrophysics in 1965 and the Russian D.Sc. degree in astrophysics in 1970. From 1974 to 1990 he was head of the Department of Relativistic Astrophysics at the Russian Space Research Institute in Moscow. Before 1991 he was head of the Department of Theoretical Astrophysics at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and has been professor at Moscow State University. Since 1994 he has been director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is currently also a professor of astrophysics at the Observatory of the University of Copenhagen, where he has been since 1991. From 1998 he is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Novikov is married to Eleonora Kotok and has two children, Elena and Dmitry. His father disappeared under Stalin and his mother spent years in the gulag. He eventually came under the wing of Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich.