On the Fortieth Anniversary of the Death of P. N. Lebedev

Forty years ago, on March 14, 1912, there died the remarkable Russian physicist, one of the greatest representatives of natural science in pre-revolutionary Russia, Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev. A brilliant experimenter, the author of works that stood at the very limit of the technical possibilities of his time, he was at the same time a profound physicist-thinker. Electromagnetic waves in the millimeter range, the pressure of light on solid bodies, the pressure of light on gases, and, finally, Lebedev’s remarkable experiments on the magnetism of rotating bodies, interrupted by his death—such is a brief list of Lebedev’s most important works, which have entered all textbooks. Yet this by no means exhausts his role in the history of Russian science. Lebedev’s name is associated not only with the image of a great scientist, but also with that of an outstanding teacher, the creator of a large school of physicists. His life was cut short early: he died at the age of 46, in the full flowering of his strength and talent, at the moment when the results of his enormous preparatory work in creating a school were only just beginning to make themselves felt.

The recollections of his pupils printed below are dedicated to the memory of this remarkable scientist.