Evgeny Lifshitz

A theoretical physicist who, with his mentor Lev Landau, co-authored the Course of Theoretical Physics, a multi-volume graduate textbook series still consulted by physicists worldwide decades after it was written. With Belinski and Khalatnikov he proposed the BKL conjecture describing how spacetime behaves near a gravitational singularity, a foundational problem in general relativity, and his name is attached to results ranging from the Casimir force in dielectrics to the Landau–Lifshitz equation in magnetism. He was only the second person to pass Landau's famously demanding "Theoretical Minimum" exam.