Quick Facts
Biography
Valery Leonidovich Pokrovsky (Russian: Валерий Леонидович Покровский; born 1931) 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 join 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 is best known for his pioneering and fundamental contributions to the 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 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.
Selected publications
- A.Z. Patashinskii, V.L. Pokrovskii, Fluctuation Theory of Phase Transitions, Pergamon Press, 1979; ISBN 0080216641