28 Facts About Yakov Zeldovich

Yakov Zeldovich was born into a Belarusian Jewish family in his grandfather's house in Minsk.

However, in mid-1914, the Yakov Zeldovich family moved to Saint Petersburg.

Yakov Zeldovich's father, Boris Naumovich Zeldovich, was a lawyer; his mother, Anna Petrovna Zeldovich, a translator from French to Russian, was a member of the Writer's Union.

Yakov Zeldovich was regarded as having a remarkably versatile intellect, and during his life he explored and made major contributions to a wide range of scientific endeavors.

From 1932 to 1934, Yakov Zeldovich attended the undergraduate courses on physics and mathematics at the Leningrad State University, and later attended the technical lectures on introductory physics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute.

The centrality of his thesis focused towards the research on the Freundlich adsorption isotherm, and Yakov Zeldovich discovered the theoretical foundation of this empirical observation.

In 1939, Yakov Zeldovich prepared his dissertation based on the mathematical theory of the physical interpretation of nitrogen oxidation, and successfully received the Doctor of Sciences in mathematical physics when it was reviewed by Alexander Frumkin.

Yakov Zeldovich is regarded as a secret principal of the Soviet nuclear weapons project; his travels abroad were highly restricted, to Eastern Europe, under close Soviet security.

In May 1941, Yakov Zeldovich worked with Khariton in constructing a theory, on the kinetics of nuclear reactions in the presence of the critical conditions.

The work of Khariton and Yakov Zeldovich was extended into theories of ignition, combustion and detonation; these accounted for features which had not previously been correctly predicted, observed, nor explained.

In 1942, Yakov Zeldovich was relocated to Kazan, and tasked by the People's Commissariat of Munitions to carry out work on conventional gun powders to be supplied to the Soviet Army, while Khariton was asked to design the new types of conventional weaponry.

Yakov Zeldovich joined Igor Kurchatov's small team at this secretive laboratory in Moscow to launch the work on the nuclear combustion theory, and became a head of the theoretical department at the Arzamas-16 in 1946.

Yakov Zeldovich had benefitted from physical and technical knowledge provided by German physicist Klaus Fuchs and American physicist Theodore Hall, who each had worked on the American Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons.

In 1949, Yakov Zeldovich led a team of physicists that conducted the first nuclear test, the RDS-1, based roughly on the American design obtained through the atomic spies in the United States, though he continued his fundamental work on explosive theory.

Yakov Zeldovich then began working on modernizing the successive designs of the nuclear weapon and initially conceived the idea of hydrogen bomb to Andrei Sakharov and others.

Between 1950 and 1953, Yakov Zeldovich performed calculations necessary for the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb that were verified by Andrei Sakharov, although the two groups worked in parallel on the development of the thermonuclear fusion.

Yakov Zeldovich remained associated with the nuclear testing program, while heading the experimental laboratories at Arzamas-16 until October 1963, when he left for academia.

In 1952, Yakov Zeldovich began work in the field of elementary particles and their transformations.

Yakov Zeldovich predicted the beta decay of a pi meson.

Yakov Zeldovich was elected academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences on 20 June 1958.

Yakov Zeldovich was a head of division at the Institute of the Applied Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1965 until January 1983.

In early 1960s, Yakov Zeldovich started working in astrophysics and physical cosmology.

Yakov Zeldovich worked on the theory of the evolution of the hot universe, the properties of the microwave background radiation, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the theory of black holes.

Yakov Zeldovich predicted, with Rashid Sunyaev, that the cosmic microwave background should undergo inverse Compton scattering.

Yakov Zeldovich contributed sharp insights into the nature of the large scale structure of the universe, in particular, through the use of Lagrangian perturbation theory and the application of the Burgers' equation approach via the adhesion approximation.

Yakov Zeldovich played a key role in developing the theory of black hole evaporation due to Hawking radiation.

Previously, In 1965, Yakov Zeldovich had predicted that Kerr black holes would split the emission lines of photons as in a Zeeman effect.

Yakov Zeldovich had one more daughter in 1945, Alexandra Varkovitskaya, with a linguist and folklorist Ludmila Varkovitskaya.