Pavel Pavlovich Kobeko

Born June 11, 1897, in Vilnius; died Jan. 6, 1954, in Leningrad. Soviet physicist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1943).

Kobeko graduated from the Agricultural Institute in the city of Gorky, Smolensk Oblast, in 1924. From 1925 to 1952 he worked in the State Physicotechnical Laboratory (since 1930, the Physicotechnical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), and from 1952 at the Institute of Macromolecular Compounds of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Beginning in 1930, he also taught at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, becoming a professor in 1935 and head of the subdepartment of the physics of dielectrics in 1944.

Kobeko studied the mechanical and physical properties of dielectrics. He was the author of important works on ferroelectricity (with I. V. Kurchatov). He was the first to study the physical properties of amorphous bodies and polymers and the physicochemical processes of polymerization. He organized a laboratory of amorphous states at the Physicotechnical Institute. In besieged Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), he worked on scientific problems for defense purposes.