Anthony Leonid Turkevich (July 23, 1916 – September 7, 2002) was an American radiochemist who was the first to determine the composition of the Moon's surface using an alpha scattering spectrometer on the Surveyor 5 mission in 1967.

[1] Turkevich was born on July 23, 1916, in Manhattan, New York, at the bishop's house attached to Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral.

[3] Turkevich moved to the Department of Physics at the University of Chicago as a research assistant with Robert Mulliken where he studied molecular spectroscopy and nuclear fission products.

He then transferred to Edward Teller's theory group to study nuclear fusion and establish whether producing a thermonuclear weapon was feasible, one of many challenges faced by scientists at Los Alamos that led to the development and use of the Monte Carlo method.

In July 1946, Turkevich and Seymour Katcoff suggested that nuclear explosions could be monitored by measuring the atmospheric concentration of the radioactive isotope krypton-85, a fission product.