Petrovskii, Aleksei

Born Feb. 2 (14), 1873, in Lukoianov, in what is now Gorky Oblast; died Aug. 24, 1942, in Sverdlovsk. Russian and Soviet specialist in radio and electrical engineering. Doctor of physical and mathematical sciences (1935). Honored Scientist and Engineer of the RSFSR (1941).

Petrovskii graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1897. He was an instructor at the Mine Officers’ Class in Kronstadt from 1901 to 1910 and became a professor there in 1912. In addition, he taught at the St. Petersburg Institute of Electrical Engineering from 1909 to 1922, at the Naval Academy from 1910 to 1924, at the Leningrad Institute of Mines from 1928 to 1938, and at other institutions. His monograph Scientific Foundations of Wireless Telegraphy (1907; 2nd ed., part 1, 1913) became one of the first manuals for the training of highly skilled specialists in radio engineering in Russia. Between 1923 and 1930, Petrovskii worked at the Institute of Applied Geophysics in Leningrad. From 1923 he was occupied chiefly with the development of electrical methods for finding mineral deposits. He was the first in the USSR to use a radio frequency method for determining the depth of occurrence of permafrost rocks.