Thc history of the Joint Institute of the Physics of the Earth at the Russian Academy of Sciences began in 1928 with the founding of the Scismological Institute on the initiative of P. M. Nikiforov, mathematician and a student of B, B. Golitsyn, The impetus for the creation of a new institute came from the catastrophic 1927 earthquake in the Crimea. O. Yu. Schmidt independent ly founded in 1937 the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics. The two institutions merged after the war, thus establishing the currently existing Joint Institute of the Physics of the Earth and a fruitful collaboration between geophysicists and seis mologists that enabled many first-class scientific investigations.