Vladimir Naumovich Gribov (Russian Влади́мир Нау́мович Гри́бов; March 25, 1930 – August 13, 1997) was a prominent Russian theoretical physicist, who worked on high-energy physics, quantum field theory and the Regge theory of the strong interactions. His best known contributions are the pomeron, the DGLAP equations, and the Gribov copies.
Life Gribov was born in Leningrad in 1930. His father died in 1938 as a result of disease. His mother, a theater worker, not an actress, brought him up alone with his younger sister. In 1941 the family was evacuated deep into the USSR and returned in 1945. In 1947, he finished school and dreamed of becoming an actor, particularly a cinema actor. He had to accept, however, his awkwardness in such things and so chose another direction: physics. In 1947, Gribov enrolled in the Physical Faculty of Leningrad University, graduating in 1952 with diploma cum laude. Despite his ability, the official antisemitism of the time meant he was only able to find employment as a physics teacher at an evening school for adults, a job with low prestige and salary. He spent two years doing this, but in 1954, after Stalin's death, he joined the Ioffe Institute in Leningrad (then called the Physical-Technical Institute, PTI), and soon became the de facto leader of the theoretical department. In the late 1950s, he participated in Lev Landau's famous weekly seminars in Moscow, where he met Isaak Pomeranchuk, whom he greatly admired and with whom he collaborated intensely. When the PTI theory department where Gribov worked, became a part of the Leningrad Institute for Nuclear Physics (LNPI) in 1971, Gribov became a leader of a seminar on quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. This seminar became famous both within the Soviet Union and internationally, because of its open-ended discussions, where prominent Russian scientists often voiced vigorous objections and debated points with the speaker and with one another. In these debates, each participant was treated equally regardless of position and reputation— the only thing that mattered was the physics. Foreign guests, no matter how prestigious, would often find themselves interrupted and corrected by Gribov in mid-lecture. Although Gribov was most interested in elementary particle physics, he enjoyed discussing problems from all fields of physics and drew many inspirations from solid-state physics. One of the principles at his institute was that a theorist should never refuse to help an experimentalist. Gribov was not an open political dissident, but he had a reputation as an independent and critical thinker. So despite his international recognition, Gribov was not allowed to travel abroad for many decades. In 1980, Gribov became a professor at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, and in the 1990s he was also appointed a scientific advisor at the Central Research Institute for Physics in Budapest. Towards the end of the 1990s he was a visiting professor at the Institute for Nuclear Physics in the University of Bonn. He received the 1991 Sakurai Prize, the 1991 Alexander von Humboldt Prize, and was the first recipient of the Landau Prize awarded by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1972. He was twice married and together with his first wife, the physicist Lilya Dubinskaya, had a son Lenya Gribov. Lenya died in a mountaineering accident shortly after he completed his PhD in theoretical physics, a tragedy which weighed on Gribov heavily. His second wife was Julia Nyiri (born 1939), a Hungarian physicist.
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