Sergei Vasilyevich Vonsovsky (born 2.09.1910) is a Soviet theoretical physicist and an academician (1966; corresponding member 1953). He was born in Tashkent. He graduated from Leningrad University (1932). In 1932-39 he worked at the Urals Physico-Technical Institute (Sverdlovsk), and in 1939—47 he was head of a department at the Institute of Metal Science, Metal Physics and Metallurgy of the Urals Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From 1947 he was head of a department and deputy director of the Institute of Metal Physics of the USSR Academy of Sciences and professor at Urals University. Chairman of the Presidium of the Urals Scientific Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences (from 1971).
His research concerned the physics of magnetic phenomena and solid-state physics, in particular the quantum theory of solids, the theory of ferro- and antiferromagnetism, the many-electron theory of metals and semiconductors, ferromagnetic resonance, magnetic anisotropy and magnetostriction, the technical magnetisation curve, and superconductivity in magnetically ordered and in rare-earth metals and alloys. In 1934—36, together with S. P. Shubin, he constructed the polar and the s-d exchange models of crystalline solids. He carried out a series of studies of elementary excitations in many-electron systems, in particular of the energy spectrum of the polar and the polar-exciton models. He developed a theory of transition metals, alloys and rare-earth compounds which takes into account the connection between the magnetic, the electrical and the other properties of this group of substances. He laid the foundations of the theory of the ferromagnetism of alloys and developed the theory of the phenomena of magnetic anisotropy and magnetostriction in ferromagnets. A considerable body of Vonsovsky's work was in the field of the theory of superconductivity in transition metals and alloys and of the problem of the simultaneous existence in them of ferro- or paramagnetism and superconductivity.
Founder of the Urals school of magnetism. Hero of Socialist Labour (1969). USSR State Prizes (1975, 1982). S. I. Vavilov Gold Medal (1982).
A foreign member of the academies of sciences of the GDR (1971) and of the Polish People's Republic (1977).