Dr. Victor Barzykin joined the faculty as an assistant professor this fall, bringing with him an impressive record in theoretical condensed matter physics that began, essentially, when he was a teenager. In 1985, at the age of 16, he won first place in the 1985 International Physics Olympiad in Yugoslavia. "It was after I graduated from high school," he said. "I think about 20 countries participated. Most of the kids were 19 years old, so I got the prize also for being the youngest." The competition itself mainly involved solving problems, something he may have been too good at. "My boss didn't want to take me because of that," Dr. Barzykin said. "I didn't want to study much, because typically what happens is that kids don't have to concentrate in college. They're know-it-alls," he laughed. "I didn't have to do anything with physics in college until year three." After that, however, things got a little more difficult. Dr. Barzykin enrolled at the L.D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, legendary for the difficulty of its 10 volumes known as the Course of Theoretical Physics, or quite simply as Landau and Lifshitz. "They make you feel stupid," Dr. Barzykin said. "They're supposed to." He went through some, but not all of the 10 famous volumes, enduring nine exams, two of them on math. "The exam was not necessarily on the 10 volumes," he said. The problems were typically challenging, requiring about three hours to work through two or three. He persevered and finished his master's in 1991. From there he went to the University of Illinois as a MacArthur Fellow and later a research assistant, earning his Ph.D. in 1995. He also spent three years at the University of British Columbia as a NATO Fellow before joining the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. He was a visiting scientist there until he joined the physics faculty at UT. Dr. Barzykin arrived on campus in August and jumped right in to teaching math methods for graduate students. He will teach solid state physics in the spring and is also looking forward to building collaborations with the condensed matter group here at UT. Among his research interests are high-temperature superconductivity, unconventional superconductors and magnets, and heavy fermion superconductors. Despite his notable resume, Dr. Barzykin didn't choose physics from the beginning. The son of scientists who studied chemistry and chemical physics, he had other plans. "I wanted to go into math," he said. "I failed badly." After a disappointing finish at an all-Russian math competition when he was 14 years old, he changed his mind. After that, he said smiling, "physics was easy." Cross Sections, Fall/Winter 2002 Issue, Contents Page UT Physics News & Notes Page UT Physics Home Page This page was last updated on December 5, 2002. Please send comments to cal@utk.edu.