Alexei Starobinsky

Alexei Alexandrovich Starobinsky was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist and cosmologist who lived from 1948 to 2023, a pioneer of the theory of cosmic inflation. While still a doctoral student, in 1973 he showed that, according to the uncertainty principle, rotating black holes must emit particles, work that led Stephen Hawking to conjecture Hawking radiation; in 1979 he became the first to propose a model of cosmic inflation, now known as Starobinsky inflation. He obtained a physics degree from Moscow State University in 1972 and a doctorate from the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1975 under Yakov Zeldovich, remaining at the Landau Institute for the rest of his career. He received the 2014 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, shared with Alan Guth and Andrei Linde.