Vladimir Pazdzerskiy

Vladimir Andreyevich Pazdzerskiy was born in Tashkent on 25 April 1934. In the 1930s his parents had been exiled to Central Asia from the European part of the USSR as “enemies of the people”. He finished Tashkent School No. 50 with a gold medal.

Drawn to the stars from childhood, he entered the physics and mathematics faculty of the Central Asian State University (SAGU), in the astronomy department. When that department was closed during his third year, he moved to theoretical physics, graduated with distinction and was kept on as an assistant.

In 1961 he and his colleague Hatam Valiyev were sent, as promising young specialists, on a placement at the Lebedev Physical Institute (FIAN) of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. There he attended Lev Landau’s seminar and chose the theorist Vitaly Fainberg as his supervisor. His first papers dealt with the interaction of pions with deuterons and with pion photoproduction; he carried out the research while continuing to teach in Tashkent.

In 1962 he defended his candidate’s dissertation before the academic council of FIAN, and in 1993 his doctoral dissertation before the specialised theoretical physics council of Tashkent State University.

In the department of theoretical physics he taught almost every modern course of the specialisation, and he gave the quantum mechanics course at the physics faculty for more than forty years. His research school took shape there, and his students work in Uzbekistan and abroad. In 1997 he received the title Honoured Mentor of Youth of the Republic of Uzbekistan for his work with young people.

Pazdzerskiy died in Tashkent on 3 September 2004 and was buried at the Botkin Cemetery. A volume of his selected works appeared in 2005.