Evgeny Lifshitz

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Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz (Russian: Евгений Михайлович Лифшиц; February 21, 1915 – October 29, 1985) was a leading Soviet physicist from a Jewish origin and the brother of Ilya Mikhailovich Lifshitz.

(Some commonly encountered alternative transliterations of his names include Yevgeny or Evgenii and Lifshits or Lifschitz.)

Lifshitz is well known in general relativity for coauthoring the BKL conjecture concerning the nature of a generic curvature singularity. As of 2006, this is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in the subject of classical gravitation.

With Lev Landau, Lifshitz co-authored an ambitious series of physics textbooks, in which the two aimed to provide a graduate-level introduction to the entire field of physics. These books are still considered invaluable and continue to be widely used. Lifshitz was the second of only 43 people ever to pass Landau's "Theoretical Minimum" examination.

The wife of Lev Landau strongly criticized his scientific abilities, hinting at how much of the two of them was done by Lifshitz, and how much by Landau. (Of their textbooks, the joke is made, "Not one word of Landau, not one thought of Lifshitz.") Despite the sniping, he is well known for many invaluable contributions, in particular to quantum electrodynamics, where he calculated the Casimir force in an arbitrary macroscopic configurations of metals and dielectrics.

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  • Belinskii, V.; Khalatnikov, I.; and Lifschitz, E. (1970). "Oscillatory approach to a singular point in the relativistic cosmology". Adv. in Phys. 19: 525-573. doi:10.1080/00018737000101171.  The paper introducing the BKL conjecture.
  • Landau, L. D.; and Lifshits, E. M. (1976). Mechanics (3rd ed.). London: Pergamon. ISBN 0-08-021022-8.  Vol. 1 of the Course of Theoretical Physics.
  • Landau, L. D.; and Lifshits, E. M. (1971). Classical Theory of Fields (3rd ed.). London: Pergamon. ISBN 0-08-016019-0.  Vol. 2 of the Course of Theoretical Physics.
  • Landau, L. D.; and Lifshits, E. M.; (1977). Quantum Mechanics: Non-relativistic Theory (3rd ed.). London: Pergamon. ISBN 0-08-020940-8.  Vol. 3 of the Course of Theoretical Physics.
  • Berestetskii, V. B.; Lifshits, E. M.; and Pitaevskii, L. P. (1982). Quantum electrodynamics (2nd ed.). London: Pergamon. 0-080-26503-0.  Vol. 4 of the Course of Theoretical Physics.
  • Lifshits, E. M.; and Pitaevskii, L. P. (1981). Physical kinetics. Oxford: Pergamon. ISBN 0-08-026480-8.  Vol. 10 of the Course of Theoretical Physics.

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