on the development and coordination of gravitation research in USSR. In 1961, on his initiative the first Soviet gravitation conference, which initiated a series of Soviet, and later also Russian, gravitation conferences was organized. At the beginning of the 1960s D. D. Ivanenko was the organizer of the gravitation section of Ministry of Higher Institutes of Learning of the USSR, which lasted until the 1980s. He was a member of the International gravitation Committee since its founding in 1959. Theoretical physics has been enormously influenced by the seminar on theoretical physics organized by D. D. Ivanenko in 1944 that has continued to meet for 50 years under his guidance at the Physics Department of Moscow State University. The distinguishing characteristic of Ivanenko's seminar was the breadth of its grasp of the problems of theoretical physics and its discussion of the links between its various divisions, for example, gravitation theory and elementary particle physics. The most prominent physicists in the world participated in the seminar: Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Hideki Yukawa, Julian Schwinger, Abdus Salam, Aage Bohr, Ilya Prigogine, John Archibald Wheeler et al. In the 1970–80s, D. Ivanenko was concentrated on gravitation theory. His scientific team mainly developed different generalizations of Einstein's general relativity, including scalar-tensor gravitation theory, the hypothesis of quark stars, gravity with torsion, gauge gravitation theory and others. In 1985, D. Ivanenko and his collaborators published two monographs Gravitation and Gauge Gravitation Theory. The scientific style of D. Ivanenko was characterized by great interest in ideas of frontiers in science where these ideas were based on strong mathematical methods or experiment. Ivanenko died on December 30, 1994, at the age of 90. His sister, Oksana Ivanenko, was a children's writer and translator. Scientific contributions His outstanding achievements include: the Fock–Ivanenko coefficients of parallel displacement of spinors in a curved space-time)(1929); the Ambartsumian–Ivanenko hypothesis of creation of massive particles (1930); the proton–neutron model of atomic nuclei (1932); the first shell model of nuclei (1932, in collaboration with E. Gapon); the first model of exchange nuclear forces (1934, in collaboration with Igor Tamm); the prediction of synchrotron radiation (1944, in collaboration with I. Pomeranchuk); the theory of hypernuclei (1956); the hypothesis of quark stars (1965, in collaboration with D. Kurdgelaidze); the gauge gravitation theory (1983, in collaboration with G. Sardanashvily). Dmitri Ivanenko published more than 300 scientific works including 6 monographs and 11 volumes edited. Notes External links Bio