Vladimir Gribov - Life

Life

Gribov completed his studies at the university of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1952, but at first he could find no employment there because of his Jewish background, so he spent two years teaching at an evening institute. In 1954 he joined the Ioffe Institute in Leningrad (then called the Physical-Technical Institute, PTI), and soon became the de facto leader of the theoretical department.

in the late 1950s, he participated in Lev Landau's famous weekly seminars in Moscow, where he met Isaak Pomeranchuk, who he greatly admired and with whom he collaborated intensely. When the PTI theory department where Gribov worked, became a part of the Leningrad Institute for Nuclear Physics (LNPI) in 1971, Gribov became responsible for leading a seminar on quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. This seminar became famous both within the Soviet Union and internationally, because of its open-ended discussions, where prominent Russian scientists often voiced vigorous objections and debated points with the speaker and with one another. In these debates, each participant was treated equally regardless of position and reputation— the only thing that mattered was the physics. Foreign guests, no matter how prestigious, would often find themselves interrupted and corrected by Gribov in mid-lecture.

Although Gribov was most interested in elementary particle physics, he enjoyed discussing problems from all fields of physics and drew many inspirations from solid-state physics. One of the principles at his institute was that a theorist should never refuse to help an experimentalist.

Gribov was not an open dissident, but he had a reputation as an independent and critical thinker. So despite his international recognition, Gribov was not allowed to travel abroad for many decades.

In 1980, Gribov became a professor at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, and in the 1990s he was also appointed a professor at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Towards the end of the 1990s he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Nuclear Physics in the University of Bonn. He received the 1991 Sakurai Prize, the 1991 Alexander von Humboldt Prize, and was the first recipient of the Landau Prize awarded by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He was twice married and together with his first wife, Lilya Dubinskaya, had a son Lenja Gribov. Lenja died in a mountaineering accident shortly after completing his PhD in theoretical physics, a tragedy which weighed on Gribov heavily. His second wife, Julia Nyiri, was Hungarian.