Volkov was born on October 29, 1924, in San Francisco, California. After her divorce, his mother married
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, head of the Silvermaster group who spied for the
Soviet Union during
World War II. Volkov spent two years as a radar operator in the
United States Navy in the
Pacific. Volkov earned a B.S. in science from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1948 and M.Sc/Ph.D degrees from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1953. His Ph.D. thesis, titled
Magnetic interactions on the basis of a modified shell model of complex nuclei, was written under the direction of
Robert G. Sachs. Afterwards, he moved to
Israel and did research at the
Technion in
Haifa, and at the
Weizmann Institute of Science in
Rehovot. From there he moved to
Copenhagen in 1963 and worked at the
Niels Bohr Institute. In 1964 he moved to
Canada and taught at
McMaster University until his retirement in 1989. ==Death==