Igor Dmitrievich Novikov

Igor Dmitrievich Novikov (Игор Дмитриевич Новиков) (born November 10, 1935) is a Russian theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist.

Novikov formulated the Novikov self-consistency principle in the mid-1980s, an important contribution to the theory of time travel.

Novikov gained his Ph. D in astrophysics in 1965 and Doctoral Degree in astrophysics in 1970. From 1974 to 1990 he was head of the Department of Relativistic Astrophysics at the Space Research Institute in Moscow. Before 1991 he was head of the Department of Theoretical Astrophyics at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and has been professor at Moscow State University. Since 1994 has been director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center (TAC) of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is currently also a professor of astrophysics at the Observatory of the University of Copenhagen, where he has been since 1991. From 1998 he is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Novikov is married to Eleonora Kotok and has two children, Elena and Dimitry. His father disappeared under Stalin and his mother spent years in the gulag. He eventually came under the wing of Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich.

Publications:

He wrote several popular books with a huge self-evident fascination, similar to ones of Stephen Hawking:

• Black Holes and the Universe, (translated by Vitaly I. Kisin, Cambridge University Press 1995)
• The River of Time, (translated by Vitaly I. Kisin, Cambridge University Press 1998, 2001)

He has authored or co-authored 15 books on cosmology and astrophysics, and wrote, with Alexander S. Sharov, a biography of Edwin Hubble, E. Hubble, Life and Work (Cambridge University Press 1992).