The author of this book, Prof. Vadim Vasilievich Schmidt, was known in the West as 'Russian Schmidt'. Being a talented theoretician and at the same time heading an experimentallaboratory in Chernogolovka, Vadim Schmidt had a unique talent for explaining complicated physical models and ideas in a simple way. One of his favorite sayings was 'physics is a verbal science'. The book is based on his introductory course on superconductivity. It was published in Russian in 1982 and very soon became undoubtedly the most popular Russian textbook on the physics of superconductors. Without losing its...