His father, Boris Nikolaevich Tolpygo (1889 – 1958) was a jurist who received the Order of St. Stanislaus for his services to the Russian army during World War I. Tolpygo's mother, Tatiana B. Bukreeva (1889 – 1992), was the daughter of Boris Yakovlevich Bukreev, a mathematician and geometer at Kyiv University (University of St. Volodymyr, Kyiv).
[3] Through the intervention of individuals such as Raymond Poincaré, President of France, he avoided execution and was sentenced to 10 years hard labor.
[5][6] In November 1939, Tolpygo was drafted into the Red Army and served in the artillery section during World War II from 1941 to 1945.
He returned to Kyiv in 1945 when all physicists were recalled from active duty to work on the atomic bomb and other projects, and to restore universities and research institutions destroyed during the War.
One of his students was Emmanuel Rashba, who became a prominent theoretical physicist and credited his success in significant part to Tolpygo's guidance and support.
Concurrently, from 1948 to 1960, he worked as a senior scientist at the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of UkrSSR, Kiev.
Tolpygo joined the movement of the "Sixtiers" (shestidesiatniki) and signed a letter to the Soviet authorities in support of dissidents Alexander Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov.
[8] Galkin convinced Tolpygo to join him in Donetsk and create there a new school of theoretical physics, far from political scrutiny.
From 1988 to his death in 1994 Tolpygo worked as principal scientist at the DonPTI and continued to teach physics at the university.
[11][12] In 1950, he predicted bound states of photons and optical phonons in ionic crystals, now known as lattice polaritons.
), cryocrystals of noble gases, and molecular crystals by introducing long-range Coulomb interactions in their lattice dynamics.
Tolpygo applied his theory of deformable ions to study the small-radius localized states of electrons in solids.
He proposed an original microscopic theory of muscle contraction based on the idea that the energy of decomposition of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecule is transferred along the chains of hydrogen bonds between actin and myosin polymers causing their mutual motion.