Evgeny Lifshitz

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.

Quotes

• We do not aim at « mathematical rigour » of exposition, which in theoretical physics often amounts to self-deception.
  • "Quantum Mechanics: Non-relativistic Theory", together with L. D. Landau, translated by John Menzies (third edition 1991), p. xi

Quotes about Lifshitz

• The great Russian physicist L. D. Landau was said to have hated writing. He coauthored an extraordinary series of textbooks in collaboration with E. M. Lifshitz, who did all the writing. From my perspective Lifshitz operated in a coauthor's paradise. He was linked to nature through Landau, who was in deep nonverbal communion with her, but had no investment whatever in the process of articulating that communion.
  It is also said that even Landau's profound technical papers were actually written by Lifshitz. Many physicists look down on Lifshitz: Landau did the physics, Lifshitz wrote it up. I don't believe that for a minute. If Evgenii Lifshitz really wrote the amazing papers of Landau, he was doing physics of the highest order. Landau was not so much a coauthor, as a natural phenomenon — an important component of the remarkable coherence of the physical world that Lifshitz wrote about so powerfully in the papers of Landau.
  • N. David Mermin, "Writing Physics" (1999)