Potapov, Makarii Vasilevich

Born Feb. 16 (28), 1887, in Kaliazin; died May 9, 1949, in Moscow. Soviet scientist in the fields of hydrotechnics and hydrology. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1940).

Potapov graduated from the St. Petersburg Institute of Railroad Engineers in 1914. In 1936 he became a professor at the V. R. Vil’iams Moscow Irrigation and Drainage Institute. He developed a method of artificial cross circulation that made it possible to change the direction of a current of water for practical application; the method is widely used in the USSR and abroad. Potapov was the author of the monograph Runoff Regulation, the first systematized handbook of calculations used in water usage management to appear in the Soviet or foreign literature on hydrotechnics.

Potapov was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1952).