Leonid Maksimovich Brekhovskikh (born 6.05.1917) is a Soviet physicist and an academician (1968; corresponding member 1953). He was born in the village of Strunkino in the former Arkhangelsk province. He graduated from Perm University (1939). In 1954-80 he worked at the Acoustics Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences (in 1954—64 as director and in 1964 — 80 as head of a department), and from 1980 he has been head of a section of the Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From 1953 he has also been professor at Moscow University, and from 1970 at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
His research is in the field of acoustics, the theory of wave propagation and the physics of the ocean. He studied the propagation of sound and electromagnetic waves in inhomogeneous media and developed the theory of the wave fields of point sources in layered inhomogeneous media. In 1946, together with L. D. Rosenberg and others, he discovered the ultra-long-range propagation of sound in the sea, and in 1970, with V. G. Kort, M. N. Kotlyakov and L. N. Fomin, the formation in the open ocean of moving synoptic eddies. He was awarded USSR State Prizes in 1951 for his research in acoustics and in 1976 for the monograph “Acoustics of the Ocean”, published in 1974. Lenin Prize. He created a school of ocean acoustics. From 1969 he has been academician-secretary of the Division of Oceanology, Atmospheric Physics and Geography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The N. D. Papaleksi Prize (1948), the J. Rayleigh Gold Medal.