Pioneers in Optics: Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and John Frederick William Herschel

The son of Russian peasants, Pavel Cherenkov faced a significant amount of adversity in his life, but he persevered admirably. He was born in the village of Novaya Chigla in the Vornezh province and grew up in a tumultuous time when Russia was engaged in war and revolution. At the age of two, Cherenkov lost his mother, and his father soon remarried, consigning much of his and his sister's upbringing to a stepmother. Later in his life, in 1938, he would also prematurely lose his father, who was killed under Stalin's regime for political reasons. As a child, Cherenkov reportedly exhibited a curious nature, was an avid reader, and performed well in school. In college, he studied mathematics and physics, graduating in 1928 from Vornezh University. Subsequently, in 1930, he married Marya Putintseva, with whom he would have two children. He relocated to Leningrad (now known as St. Petersburg) to embark on postgraduate research at the P.N. Lebedev Institute of Physics in the Academy of Sciences.