Habib Abdullayev

Habib Muhamedovich Abdullayev was born on 31 August 1912 in the village of Aravan in the Fergana region (now in Kyrgyzstan) to a peasant family. From 1930 to 1935 he studied at the Central Asian Industrial Institute in Tashkent and graduated as a geological engineer. He then headed a prospecting party of the Sredazgeologorazvedka trust and studied the structure, composition and origin of the Langar tungsten-molybdenum deposit.

In 1937–1939 he did postgraduate work and taught at the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute, defending his candidate dissertation in 1939. From 1940 he was a docent in the department of mineral resources at the Central Asian Polytechnic Institute in Tashkent and for a time its director; in 1941 he was appointed head of the industry department of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan’s Central Committee. From 1942 he was deputy chairman of the republic’s government, and from 1944 also chairman of its State Planning Committee; during the war he worked on locating and developing strategic mineral resources.

In 1943 he became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, in 1946 he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Geology of the Scheelite-Bearing Skarns of Central Asia”, and in 1947 he became an academician and vice-president of the Academy; during those years he also directed the Institute of Geology. From 1956 until his death he was president of the Academy, and in 1958 he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Abdullayev’s central scientific idea was the theory of a genetic link between ore mineralisation and granitoid intrusions, for which he received the Lenin Prize in 1959. He identified Central Asia as a distinct metallogenic province and showed how deposits of tungsten, tin, and non-ferrous and ferrous metals formed. He wrote more than 130 scientific works, including 7 monographs; 7 doctoral and 28 candidate dissertations were defended under his supervision. He founded the Department of Petrology and Metallogeny at the Tashkent Polytechnic Institute, organised the Uzbek Geological Journal, and in 1960 became a member of the Geological Society of France and the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain.

Habib Abdullayev died in Tashkent on 20 June 1962 and was buried in the Chigatay cemetery. In 1970 he was posthumously awarded the Beruni State Prize of the Uzbek SSR, and in 2002 the Order “Buyuk xizmatlari uchun” (“For Outstanding Merit”). The Institute of Geology and Geophysics, streets in Tashkent and Osh and several schools bear his name; a Gold Medal in his name was established in 1992 and a museum opened at the institute. A Tashkent metro station carried his name from 2001 to 2015.