Valery Pokrovsky

Who is Valery Pokrovsky?

Valery Pokrovsky is a Soviet and Russian physicist. He is a member of the Landau Institute in Chernogolovka near Moscow in Russia and a professor for Theoretical Physics at Texas A&M University.

After having received his master degree from Kharkov University, Ukrainian SSR, USSR, in 1953. Valery Pokrovsky defended his PhD thesis at Tomsk University in 1957. Until 1966 he was a scientist at the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. In 1966 he was invited to the newly founded Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He also was employed as a professor at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 1992 he became a professor of Physics at Texas A&M University.

His areas of research are Quantum Mechanics, Statistical Physics, and Condensed Matter theory. He ist best known for his pioneering and fundamental contributions to modern theory of phase transitions, together with Alexander Patashinski, in 1965, as well as the analysis of transformations between commensurate and incommensurate superstructures in two-dimensional systems, the Pokrovsky-Talapov transition.

Valery Pokrovsky received for his outstanding work several awards, including the Landau Prize of the Soviet Academy of Science in 1984, the Humboldt Prize in 2000, and the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society in 2005.