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Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg (Russian: Виталий Лазаревич Гинзбург; born October 4, 1916 in Moscow) is a Russian (formerly Soviet) theoretical physicist and astrophysicist and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the successor to Igor Tamm as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Academy's physics institute (FIAN), and an outspoken atheist.[1]
[edit] Life and work
He was born to a Jewish family in Moscow in 1916, and graduated from the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1938. He defended his candidate's (Ph.D.) dissertation in 1940, and his doctor's dissertation in 1942. He has been working at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow since 1940 (as of 2004). Among his achievements are a partially phenomenological theory of superconductivity, the Ginzburg-Landau theory, developed with Landau in 1950; the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation in plasmas (for example, in the ionosphere); and a theory of the origin of cosmic radiation. In the 1950s, he played a key role in the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
Ginzburg identifies himself as a secular Jew, and since the collapse of communism in the former USSR, he has been very active in Jewish life, especially in Russia, where he served on the board of directors of the Russian Jewish Congress. He is also well known for fighting anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel.[2].
[edit] Honors
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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Nobel Prize in Physics (2003)
