Igor Kurchatov

Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (?????? ??????????? ?????????) (January 8, 1903 – February 7, 1960), Soviet/Russian physicist. He was the leader of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Kurchatov was born in Simsky zavod, Ufa Guberniya (now city of Sim, Chelyabinsk Oblast). He studied physics at Crimea State University and ship building at the Polytechnical Institute in Petrograd. In 1925 he moved to the Physico-Technical Institute, where he worked (under Abram Fedorovich Ioffe) on various problems connected with radioactivity. In 1932 he received funding for his own nuclear science research team, which built the Soviet Union's first cyclotron.

References

• Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes (ISBN 0684824140)
• PBS documentary Citizen Kurchatov