
Andre Geim was born in 1958 in Sochi. However, the future prominent scientist went to school in Nalchik – his father Konstantin Alekseevich was appointed chief engineer at Nalchik Electrovacuum Plant. In Chernogolovka, Moscow Region, where Geim worked after graduating from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, at the British universities of Nottingham and Bath, the universities at Copenhagen and Dutch Nijmegen – Andre Geim was always true to himself: incredibly gifted, extraordinarily efficient, unusually witty. The prominent scientist received citizenship and even bought a house in the Netherlands, but did not take hold there. “My sense of humor did not fit the Dutch scientific community,” Geim told journalists. However, the British scientific community liked physicist’s talent and humor: today Andre Geim chairs the Manchester Center for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology. The current Nobel Prize laureate, honorary doctor of several European universities, a member of the Royal Society of London was awarded the most prestigious prizes and medals in the scientific world and is included in the list of fifty most influential scientists of the world. His extraordinary sense of humor was also awarded: in 2000, Andre Geim received the parody Ig Nobel Prize for his levitation experiment: Geim made a frog fly with a superconducting magnet. Andre Konstantinovich eagerly went to Harvard University to take this prize, and next year his joke was even funnier: he made his pet hamster Tisha a co-author of one of his articles.