Leonid Pimonow was born on the 18th July 1908 in the then Russian Empire city of Orenburg in the family of rich Old Believers.

His father Vassili Pimonow and the family owned a large wood processing enterprise in Orenburg; he also was a contractor and a merchant. However, the main investments and the place of residence of the family were in the territory of Lithuania the then Poland.

After the Bolshevik revolution in 1918 in Russia the Pimonow family was forced to leave Russia and all property of the family was nationalized. The family then lived in Caucasus region for a while. That is where a great disaster happened: Leonid’s father Vassili Pimonow died with spotted fever. Leonid’s mother and her three children were not doing well: she was severely ill and the children were in hunger. Only in 1921 with a special permission of the Bolshevik government they were allowed to leave for Lithuania, where their closest relatives (grandmother, uncles, etc.) were living. This saved the family from dying with hunger.

Leonid Pimonow lived in Vilnius throughout the entire interwar period; here he graduated from the gymnasium and the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of Steponas Batoras University in Vilnius in 1937. In his years of studies he met his future wife Eugenia Starchevska.

As the Bolsheviks occupied Lithuania property of the family was nationalized again. There was a threat of being repressed. Leonid Pimonow and his wife left for the then Poland occupied by Germans in 1941. During the war he was imprisoned in German concentration camps and being an especially capable scientist he also worked in German industrial companies. Several alliance states that won the war, like the USA, Russia and France, tried to recruit and take him as a famous inventor. Under the difficult circumstances L. Pimonow occurred in Paris in 1947. He made an overnight academic career from ordinary worker to director of the National Academic Research Institute there. He was the chairman of the French Acoustics Society, corresponding member of many academies worldwide and an author of many inventions and patents.

He underwent a dire calamity in 1980. L. Pimonow’s wife Eugenia went sick with the Alzheimer’s disease. Till her very death in 1996 Leonid was nursing her at home in Paris. Eugenia Pimonowa was buried in Vilnius Cemetery of Old Believers. To monumentalize memory of his wife Leonid Pimonow established the Eugenia and Leonid Pimonows Alzheimer’s Disease Support Fund in 1997 in Vilnius. Until his last days he was taking an active care in activity of the Fund and supporting the Fund materially. Development of activity of the Fund was the greatest concern of the last years of his life. Leonid Pimonow died on the 24th of March 2000 in Vilnius. He was buried in Vilnius Cemetery of Old Believers.