Aleksei Vasilievich Shubnikov: Memories of the Man and his Scientific Achievements on the 125th Anniversary of his Birth

This paper is devoted to some aspects of the life and scientific achievements of Aleksei Vasilievich Shubnikov an outstanding physicist and crystallographer of the 20th Century. The main areas of his activity and the important results that he obtained are presented briefly. He combined in one person the talents of researcher, teacher and high level scientific manager. He was the founder and the first director of the famous Russian (formerly Soviet) Institute of Crystallography. It was a long and difficult task for him to establish crystallography as a separate area of science-an area closely related to mathematics, chemistry, geology and molecular biology.