Kharkevich, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

Born Jan. 21 (Feb. 3), 1904, in St. Petersburg; died Mar. 30, 1965, in Moscow. Soviet scientist in telecommunications and electro-acoustics. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1964).

In 1930, Kharkevich graduated from the Leningrad V. I. Ul’ia-nov (Lenin) Electrical Engineering Institute. He worked at the Central Radio Laboratory from 1929 to 1932. He taught at the Leningrad Military Electrical Engineering Academy (1932–38), the Leningrad Electrical Engineering Institute of Communications (1938–41), the I’vov Polytechnic Institute (1944–48), and the Moscow Electrical Engineering Institute of Communications (1952–62); he became a professor in 1938. Kharkevich conducted research at the Moscow Physicotechnical Institute from 1941 to 1944 and at the Kiev Institute of Physics from 1948 to 1952. In 1962 he became head of the Institute of Information Transfer Problems of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Kharkevich’s main works were devoted to the theory and design of electroacoustic devices, the theory of spectra, and the theory of self-excited oscillations. Kharkevich wrote more than 100 scientific articles, including ten monographs; his Essays on the General Theory of Communications (1955) has become one of the basic works in information theory.

Kharkevich was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.