Evgeny Lifshitz

Evgeny Mikhailovich Lifshitz (, Евге́ний Миха́йлович Ли́фшиц; February 21, 1915, Kharkiv – October 29, 1985, Moscow) was a leading Soviet physicist and brother of the physicist Ilya Lifshitz.

Born into a Ukrainian Jewish family in Kharkiv, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire (now Kharkiv, Ukraine).

Lifshitz is well known in the field of general relativity for coauthoring the BKL conjecture concerning the nature of a generic curvature singularity.

, this is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in the subject of classical gravitation.

With Lev Landau, Lifshitz co-authored Course of Theoretical Physics, 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.

He made many invaluable contributions, in particular to quantum electrodynamics, where he calculated the Casimir force in an arbitrary macroscopic configuration of metals and dielectrics.

A special multicritical point, the Lifshitz point, carries, since 1975, his name.

Landau and Lifshitz suggested in the third volume of the Course of Theoretical Physics that the then-standard periodic table had a mistake in it, and that lutetium should be regarded as a d-block rather than an f-block element.

Their suggestion was fully vindicated by later findings, and in 1988 was endorsed by a report of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).