Alexei Vasilyevich Lykov (20.09.1910 —28.06.1974) was a Soviet physicist and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1956). He was born in Kostroma. He graduated from the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute (1930). In 1942 —54 he was head of a department at the Moscow Technological Institute of the Food Industry and at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering, and head of a laboratory at the Power Engineering Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From 1956 he was director of the Institute of Power Engineering of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR, from 1963 of the Institute of Heat and Mass Transfer of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR, and at the same time from 1966 head of the department of thermophysics at Byelorussian University.
His work was in the field of thermophysics, mainly of heat and mass transfer. He studied the mechanism of the transfer of heat and moisture in capillary-porous bodies and proposed a system of differential equations and boundary conditions describing the processes of heat and mass transfer. He was the first to formulate problems of heat transfer with boundary conditions of the fourth kind, and created new methods of solving unsteady problems of great practical importance. On the basis of this research numerous rapid methods of determining the thermophysical characteristics of materials experimentally were developed and brought into use. He constructed an analytical theory of thermal conduction and a theory of drying. He discovered (1935) the thermal diffusion of moisture in capillary-porous bodies (the Lykov effect).
He founded a school in the field of heat and mass transfer. USSR State Prize (1951). The I. I. Polzunov Prize (1969). The Institute of Heat and Mass Transfer of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR is named after Lykov.