In late 1945 and early 1946, a group of prominent Soviet scientists, including in particular the future Nobel Prize winner Pyotr Kapitsa, lobbied the government for the creation of a higher educational institution radically different from the type established in the Soviet system of higher education. Applicants, carefully selected by challenging examinations and personal interviews, would be taught by, and work together with, prominent scientists. Each student would follow a personalized curriculum created to match his or her particular areas of interest and specialization. This system would later become known as the Phystech System.
The Phystech System
The following is a summary of the key principles of the Phystech System, as outlined by Kapitsa in his 1946 letter arguing for the founding of MIPT:
- Rigorous selection of gifted and creative young individuals.
- Involving leading scientists in student education, in close contact with them in their creative environment.
- An individualized approach to encourage the cultivation of students’ creative drive, and to avoid overloading them with unnecessary subjects and rote learning common in other schools and necessitated by mass education.
- Conducting their education in an atmosphere of research and creative engineering, using the best existing laboratories in the country.
In its implementation, the Phystech System combines highly competitive admissions, extensive fundamental education in mathematics, as well as theoretical and experimental physics in the undergraduate years, and immersion in research work at leading research institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences starting as early as the second or third year.
The institute has eleven departments, ten of them with an average of 80 students admitted annually into each. Now, the very best of international stduents are also admitted here.
- Radio Engineering and Cybernetics
- General and Applied Physics
- Aerophysics and Space Research
- Molecular and Biological Physics
- Physical and Quantum Electronics
- Aeromechanics and Flight Engineering
- Applied Mathematics and Control
- Problems of Physics and Power Engineering
- Innovation and High Technology
- Nano-, Bio-, Information and Cognitive Technologies
The eleventh faculty, Information Business Systems, offers only a Master’s programme and accepts students with Bachelor’s degrees from other faculties or other institutes.
In addition, a number of Russian and Western companies act as base organizations of MIPT. These include:
- 1C Company
- ABBYY
- Competentum Group or Physicon
- NPMP “Concept Consulting”
- Intel
- IPG Photonics in WIKI and official website
- Kraftway
- MetaSythesis
- Paragon Software Group
- S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia
- SWsoft
- Yandex
Do you want to know who studied under the Phystech System?
Famous faculty and alumni
- Alexander Abramov – founder of Evraz Group, #137 on the Forbes list
- Boris Aleshin – deputy prime minister in Russian government (2003–2004), president of AvtoVAZ (2007–2009), general director of TsAGI (2009-)
- Boris Babaian – a pioneer of Russian supercomputers, an Intel Fellow 2004 and software architect
- Yuri Baturin – former Russian head of national security, cosmonaut (1998 and 2001 missions)
- Oleg Belotserkovsky – rector of MIPT (1962–1987), prominent mathematician and mechanician
- Andrei Bolibrukh – a mathematician who solved Hilbert’s twenty-first problem in 1989
- Nikolai Borisovich Delone – a physicist who discovered multiphoton ionization.
- Alexander V Frolov – CEO of Evraz Group, #390 on the Forbes list
- Sir Andrey Geim – discoverer of graphene, gecko tape, and levitating frogs; Fellow of the Royal Society, Nobel Prize in physics, 2010
- Sir Konstantin Novoselov – Nobel Prize in physics for graphene research, 2010
- Vitaly Ginzburg – prominent physicist, Nobel Prize 2003, co-developer of the Soviet H-bomb
- Yurij Ionov – discovered genome instability as a mechanism in colonic carcinogenesis
- Aleksandr Kaleri – cosmonaut, spent 609 days on the Mir and ISS space stations
- Pyotr Kapitsa – discovered superfluidity,Nobel Prize 1978
- Leonid Khachiyan – famous for his Ellipsoid method for linear programming, Fulkerson Prize (1982)
- Mikhail Kirpichnikov – Russian Science & Technology Minister (1998–2000), dean of Biology at MSU (2006-)
- Alex Konanykhin – Entrepreneur, former banker, former Russian oligarch, with political asylum in USA.
- Nikolay Kudryavtsev – rector of MIPT (1997-), director of Schlumberger (2007-)
- Lev Landau – prominent Russian physicist, Nobel Prize 1962
- Sergei Lebedev – invented MESM (1950) and BESM (1953) mainframe computers
- Alexander Migdal – defined 2D quantum gravity, 2D/3D visualization software and internet entrepreneur
- Sergey Nikolsky – prominent Russian mathematician
- Alexander Polyakov – quantum field theory classics, Dirac’86 and Lorentz’94 Medals
- Alexandr Prokhorov – a co-inventor of the laser, Nobel Prize 1964
- Boris Rauschenbach – rocket scientist in control engineering, responsible for the first photographs of the far side of the Moon (1959)
- Boris Saltykov – Russian Minister of Science and Technology (1991–1996)
- Aleksandr Serebrov – cosmonaut, 373 days in outer space (four flights)
- Nikolay Semyonov – best known for his work on chain reactions, Nobel Prize 1956 in chemistry
- Natan Sharansky – Israeli Cabinet Minister (1996–2005), US Congressional Gold Medal (1986)
- Mikhail Shifman – non-perturbative QCD classics, Sakurai Prize (1999), Lilienfeld Prize (2006)
- Volodymyr Shkidchenko – Defense Minister of Ukraine (2003–2004), four-star general of the Army
- Rashid Sunyaev – an author of the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect and a model of black holes
- Victor Veselago – put forward a theory for metamaterials of the 21st century in 1967
- Alexander Zamolodchikov – quantum field theory classics
- Dmitry Zelenin – governor of Tverskaya Oblast (2004–2011)
How do you like that!?
Learning in Russia 