Lev Sheviakov

Born Jan 2 (14), 1889, in Vetluga, in what is now Gorky Oblast; died July 3, 1963, in Moscow. Soviet mining expert. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939).

Sheviakov graduated from the Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk) Mining Institute in 1912. In 1913 he began teaching at the institute, becoming a professor in 1920. In 1929 he became a professor at the Siberian Technological Institute, and in 1932, a professor at the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute. From 1944 to 1950 he was a professor at the Moscow Mining Institute. Between 1939 and 1963 he worked at the A. A. Skochinskii Mining Institute (known as the Mining Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR until 1959). Sheviakov was chairman of the Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1946 to 1949 and served as a member of the State Planning Committee of the USSR from 1947 to 1957.

Sheviakov’s main works dealt with the applications of analytic methods, for example, the establishment of quantitative relationships between the mining geological, mining engineering, and economic parameters of working deposits. Sheviakov developed a technique for calculating support pillars. The founder of a scientific school of mine planning, he devised a classification of underground methods of working mines.

Sheviakov received the State Prize of the USSR in 1942. He was awarded two Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals.