Personalia

The article is dedicatedtothe 135th anniversary of Rudolf Eduardovich David, an outstanding Russian scientist, academician ofthe Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, who was at the origins of the organization and development of meteorology and agrometeorology in the Lower Volga region. The main stages of the biography and some little-known aspects of the professional activity of R. E. David are discussed. The biographical study used archival materials and memoirs of employees of Saratov State University.

This paper presents a brief biography of the Professor Maxim G. Minich, a Soviet and Russian specialist in fossil fish and stratigraphy of the Permian and Triassic of the Russian Plate and the Cis-Uralian peripheral depression. He was a brilliant representative of the middle generation of the Saratov school of vertebrate researchers, the head of the Department of Biostratigraphy and Paleontology at the Scientific Research Geological Institute of Saratov State University and latterly its Director. He was an honorary member of the All-Russian Paleontological Society.

On October 24, 2010, Dean of the Faculty of Geography Alexei Nikolaevich Chumachenko celebrated his 50th anniversary. Half a century of life, Doctor of Geographical Sciences, Professor A.N. Chumachenko meets full of vital energy, in the bloom of creative power.

In connection with the centenary of the Saratov State University. N.G. Chernyshevsky, we remember those wonderful scientists who were at the forefront of scientific schools and areas that have developed within its walls. Among them was the largest domestic geologist Fedor Petrovich Savarensky, the founder of the schools of hydrogeology and engineering geology in the Soviet Union.