Vadim Genrikhovich Knizhnik (
Russian: Вади́м Ге́нрихович Кни́жник; 20 February 1962,
Kiev
Kyiv, also spelled Kiev, is the capital and most populous city of Ukraine. It is in north-central Ukraine along the Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2021, its population was 2,962,180, making Kyiv the seventh-most populous city in Europe.
Ky ...
– 25 December 1987,
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
) was a
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
of
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
and
Russian descent.
Biography
Knizhnik studied
physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which ...
from 1978 to 1984 at the
Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology. He has received his PhD at the
Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. His supervisor was
Prof. A. Polyakov, however, at the time of his PhD courses ("aspirantship") Vadim was already a first-class physicist, and supervising him was a pure formality. In 1986 he became a member of the Landau Institute. His distinguished abilities showed quite early. At the secondary school he won twice the
USSR
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nati ...
national physics olympiad. He wrote his first scientific article (in collaboration with Prof. L. Andreev) as a student in 1982. This article has dealt with kinetic properties of quantum crystals. From 1984 he turned to
quantum field theory
In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles and ...
and made very important contributions to
string theory
In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and intera ...
.
[A. B. Zamolodchikov in ''Frontiers in Nonperturbative Field Theory'', ed. Z. Horvath, l. Palla and A. Patkos, World Scientific, , page vii.] Knizhnik died of a heart attack at the very young age of 25.
See also
*
Knizhnik–Zamolodchikov equations
In mathematical physics the Knizhnik–Zamolodchikov equations, or KZ equations, are linear differential equations satisfied by the correlation functions (on the Riemann sphere) of two-dimensional conformal field theories associated with an affin ...
References
External links
Russian Jewish Encyclopedia retrieved November 24, 2006
{{DEFAULTSORT:Knizhnik, Vadim Genrikhovich
1962 births
1987 deaths
Scientists from Kyiv
Ukrainian Jews
Soviet Jews
Soviet physicists
Jewish physicists
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology alumni
Russian string theorists