Alexei Fridman
Alexey Maksimovich Fridman (17 February 1940 – 29 October 2010) was a Soviet physicist specializing in astrophysics, physics of gravitating systems and plasma physics. He discovered new types of instabilities in gravitating media, created the theory of planetary rings and predicted the existence of small Uranus satellites that were later discovered. He also developed the hydrodynamic theory of spiral structure in galaxies. Fridman worked at the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, INASAN, and was professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and at Moscow State University. Biography. Alexey "Alik" Fridman was born in  Moscow on February 17, 1940, in a Jewish family, to Maksim Efimovich Fridman (surgeon, MD/Ph.D./Sci.D.; 1903–1990) and Felitsia Yakovlevna Sheinbaum (economist, 1907–1999). The Polyachenko family lived in the same building, and Alik Fridman and Valerij Polyachenko's lifelong friendship (and later scientific collaboration) started before they were five years old. Following a brief arrest and release of Maksim Fridman perhaps on a prelude to "Doctors' plot" in 1951, the family moved to Frunze (now Bishkek), Kyrgyzstan. Fridman spent summers in Moscow staying with the family of his father's sister, Elena Fridman, and her husband, David A.  Frank-Kamenetskii. Following the death of Joseph Stalin and the general amnesty, cities with warm climate filled with criminals and the crime rates skyrocketed. Police was failing, and while in high school Fridman and many other young men joined "the neighborhood watch" brigades organized by Komsomol and police. He did not miss a single training session in military sambo, and acquired many knife scars from the street action. He was the only one who remained alive from his team of four by the graduation. After high school graduation (1957), Fridman attempted to enter Moscow Physics and Technology Institute, but was  failed on the oral math exam as often happened to Jewish applicants. He spent this year at Kyrgyzstan University in Frunze, then entered the Kazan University (1958) where he did undergraduate research with Prof. A. Petrov. In 1958, at the age of 18, Fridman passed the first exam, mathematics, in the series of Theoretical minimum, with Lev Landau. In 1960, on advice from David A. Frank-Kamenetskii, Fridman transferred to Novosibirsk University, from which he graduated in 1963 with a M. S. in Physics. The academic career of the young scientist went well until in 1968 he signed the "letter  of 46" in defense of imprisoned dissidents. However, with support of many prominent scientists, most of the scientists "signers" careers (not fully) recovered, and even though, following defense, Fridman's Doctor of Science dissertation spent over two years "waiting" to be considered for the approval of the Highest Attestation committee, the degree was finally awarded to him in 1972. In 1971 he was offered the opportunity to create a laboratory of plasma physics in SibIZMIR (now Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics) Irkutsk, and he moved there with Valerij Polyachenko, Ilia Shukhman, and Alexander Morozov. Letter of the 46. Fridman was  one of the 46 people who signed "the letter of the 46" in 1968 protesting against the closed court proceedings of four Moscow dissidents: A. Ginzburg, Yu. Galanskov, A. Dobrovolskii, and V. Lashkova, addressed to the Supreme Court of Russian Federal Republic and to the Attorney General of the USSR. The text of the letter was published in the "New York Times" on March 23, 1968. A massive internal political campaign of repressions followed; Fridman was fired from Novosibirsk University, but continued to hold a position at the Institute of Nuclear Physics. More than 250 scientific papers in plasma physics , quantum physics of solid body, theoretical physics, cosmology, relativistic astrophysics, general problem of gravity physics, dynamics of stellar systems, gravity hydrodynamics, nonlinear dynamics (solitons, shock waves, vortices, turbulence), dynamics of gaseous galactic disk, problem of spiral structure generation, laboratory simulation of spiral-vortex structure generation on the set-up with rotating shallow water, models of the Milky Way, dynamics of accretion disks, dynamics of circumstellar disks, cosmogony, physics of planetary rings, dynamics of space tether systems, seismic activity of the Earth, tsunami wave suppression.