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Academician Alexey Starobinsky Passes Away
© Nikolay Malakhin / Scientific Russia
Alexey Starobinsky, the outstanding Russian and Soviet physicist, specialist in the gravity and cosmology of the early universe, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, professor at HSE University, and world-class scientist, has died at the age of 75.
He was one of the creators of the inflationary universe model. In 1979, he mathematically proved that before the Big Bang, which gave birth to our universe, there was an inflationary stage when the universe expanded rapidly. This discovery is considered the most important achievement in cosmology in the past half-century.
Prof. Starobinsky graduated with honours from the Faculty of Physics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. He studied with Yakov Zeldovich, the famous physicist and Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, worked for many years at the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and travelled the path from graduate student to chief researcher.
In the 1990s and 2000s, he worked as a visiting research scientist at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris, France), the Henri Poincaré Institute (Paris, France), and taught at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University (Japan) and the Research Centre for the Early Universe at the University of Tokyo (Japan). Since 2017, he taught courses in astrophysics and cosmology for master’s students at the Faculty of Physics at HSE University.
Alexey Starobinsky was awarded the medal of the Order ‘For Merit to the Fatherland’, II degree (2009), and the USSR medal ‘For Labour Valour’ (1986). He received prestigious awards: the Kavli Prize in astrophysics, the Dirac Prize in theoretical and mathematical physics (he spoke about this and his students in an interview with the HSE University website), the Gruber Prize—the highest global award in cosmology, the Isaac Pomeranchuk Prize in theoretical physics, and many others.
HSE University mourns together with Prof. Starobinsky's students and relatives.