Born Minsk, (Belarus), 8 March 1914
Died Moscow, (Russia), 2 December 1987
Soviet theoretical physicist Yakov Zel'dovich made his mark in the astronomical world as founder of the Soviet school of astrophysics and cosmology, within which many ideas of current importance were formulated at the same time (between about 1955 and 1975) as they were being developed in the United States and Europe. Zel'dovich was born into a Jewish family of too high a social class to be initially eligible for college training in Stalin's USSR, and he began his career as a laboratory technician. Zel'dovich's great promise was recognized by more senior scientists, and he was then educated at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Leningrad and the Institute of Chemical Physics, obtaining the degree of Candidate of Sciences in 1936. He was later professor at Moscow State University and divisional head at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute.
Work on the Soviet nuclear program meant that Zel'dovich was 68...
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Selected References
Doroshkevich, A. G., Ya. B. Zel'dovich, and I. D. Novikov (1967). “The Origin of Galaxies in an Expanding Universe.” Soviet Astronomy‐AJ 11: 233–239.
Doroshkevich, A. G., Ya. B. Zel'dovich, and R. A. Sunyaev (1978). “Fluctuations of the Microwave Background Radiation in the Adiabatic and Entropic Theories of Galaxy Formation.” Soviet Astronomy 22: 523–528.
Guseinov, O. Kh. and Ya. B. Zel'dovich (1966). “Collapsed Stars in Binary Systems.” Soviet Astronomy‐AJ 10: 251–253.
Ostriker, J. P., G. I. Barenblatt, and R. A. Sunyaev (eds.) (1993). Selected Works of Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich. Vol. 2, Particles, Nuclei and the Universe. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Sakharov, Andrei (1988). “A Man of Universal Interests.” Nature 331: 671–672.
Sunyaev, R. A. and Ya. B. Zel'dovich (1972). “The Observations of Relic Radiation as a Test of the Nature of X‐Ray Radiation from the Clusters of Galaxies.” Comments on Astrophysics and Space Physics 4: 173–178.
Zel'dovich, Ya. B. (1964). “The Fate of a Star and the Evolution of Gravitational Energy upon Accretion.” Soviet Physics‐Doklady 9: 195–197.
——— (1970). “Gravitational Instability: An Approximate Theory for Large Density Perturbations.” Astronomy and Astrophysics 5: 84–89.
——— (1992). My Universe: Selected Reviews. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood.
Zel'dovich, Ya. B. and I. D. Novikov (1970). “A Hypothesis for the Initial Spectrum of Perturbations in the Metric of the Friedmann Model Universe.” Soviet Astronomy‐AJ 13: 754–757.
——— (1983). Structure and Evolution of the Universe. 2 Vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Scott, D. (2007). Zel'dovich, Yakov Borisovich. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1525
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