Boris Chirikov

Boris Valerianovich Chirikov (6 June 1928 to 12 February 2008) was a Soviet and Russian physicist who founded the physical theory of Hamiltonian chaos and made pioneering contributions to the theory of quantum chaos. Born in Oryol, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1952, worked with Budker at the Kurchatov Institute, and in 1959 moved with him to Akademgorodok in Novosibirsk, to the institute now named after Budker, where he worked until the end of his life. In 1959 he proposed the Chirikov criterion, an analytical estimate for the overlap of resonances that marks the transition from integrability to global chaos, and he introduced the Chirikov standard map and the quantum kicked rotator model. His group also studied the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem, Arnold diffusion and the chaotic dynamics of Halley's comet. He became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1983 and a full member in 1992, and taught at Novosibirsk State University.