The Swedish engineer and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel who initiated the prize of his name, denied the representatives of the most sophisticated of precise sciences the right to aspire to it, although mathematics has gone ahead a great deal from the first primitive notions of numbers and a line as the shortest distance between two points to discovering such global characteristics today which are near to exhaustive.

Whatever curves Aleksey Vasilyevich chooses to follow amid boundless mathematical expanse, his life has never known U turns.

May God bless him with everything that he deserves...

... in mathematical encyclopaedias of different countries his name is put next to Archimedes, Euclid, Newton, Euler, Lobachevsky... He was lucky with his teachers: they were the corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Russia Nikolay Vladimirovich Yefimov from Moscow and Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov form Petersburg. It were they who many years ago instilled in the young scientist an obsession with science, faithfulness to maths, that became the main object of his whole life.

Pogorelov's main works are dedicated to the so called "general" geometry. He has been awarded almost all titles and prizes that a scientist can possibly get. In 1962 A.V. was awarded the Lenin prize for a series of works on geometry. Among those were works on the theory of shells, the main purpose of which was the research of a material object with one dimension much smaller than the other two, and the states that it can possibly take.

Aleksey Vasilyevich's unique mathematical gift is remarkably combined with an original engineering thinking, as academician V. A. Marchenko says. Today any school child is aware from his physics school curriculum about superconductivity. If it could be used in electrical appliances today, we would have had a greatest advantage. Anyway, in the mid 80's, academician Boris Verkin put forward an idea of creating a superconducting generator. Aleksey Vasilyevich could not help staying away from this fascinating occupation. Thanks to his engineering feel and talent he put forward an unordinary design of such generator, made all necessary calculations and virtually built this unique machine. It was successfully tested at "Electrosila" plant in Leningrad, and it should not be lain to the charge of the scientists that "perestroyka" did not allow to finish it completely.

The title page of the school text book on geometry that has been used by generations of school children in the U.S.S.R. as well as in many former Soviet Union countries carries the name of A. V. Pogorelov. Aleksey Vasilyevich possesses another wonderful gift - the ability to explain incredibly complex subjects in a simple and easy way.