Famous for developing the AK-47 assault rifle while he was working for the Russian army. The name AK-47 is an acronym for "Avtomat Kalashnikov model 1947," the year of its design.
Later in his career he developed a squad automatic weapon variant of the AK-47, known as the RPK-47[?] (Ruchnoi Pulemyot Kalashnikova - Kalashnikov's Light Machinegun), and also the PK (Pulemyot Kalashnikova - Kalashnikov's Machinegun), which used a much larger cartridge (the same full-powered rifle cartridge as employed in the Mosin-Nagant rifle) and was belt-fed rather than magazine-fed (though in other respects, it was nearly the same design!).
His son later became a weapons designer, and lost in the recent "Abakan" design competition which saw the adoption of the AN-94 Nikonov rifle by the Russian army.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump