In celebration of Ilya Lifshitz
Here, virtually every physicist has encountered the famous Landau and Lifshitz textbooks, but many may not know that there were two Lifshitz brothers, both physicists. The textbook Lifshitz is the older, Evgeny Lifshitz (1915–85); this article concerns the younger, Ilya Lifshitz (1917–82), shown in figure 1 as a young man. Their parents were Mikhail Lifshitz, a physician, and Berta. Mikhail was from a poor Jewish family that lived in the Pale of Settlement in tsarist Russia. He received his medical education in Heidelberg, Germany, where he won a gold medal for student research and, according to family legend, was presented to Queen Victoria as one of the best European medical students. As was traditional in such families, Evgeny and Ilya received a sound early education at home. Evgeny excelled in languages; Ilya was proficient in music.