It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Professor Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii who died on August 23, 2022 in Rovereto, Italy. Lev Pitaevskii was one of the leading physicists in the Soviet Union alongside Landau and Ginzburg. In the early 1990s he immigrated to Israel as part of the aliya from the USSR. He was appointed a faculty member in the Technion physics department in 1994, but unfortunately after several years left for a permanent position at the University of Trento, Italy.
Lev Pitaevskii was an extraordinary theoretical physicist with contributions to many fields of physics including quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics and plasma physics. Professor Pitaevskii was a leader in the field of low temperature physics, where much of the physics is described by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
For his work Pitaevskii was awarded several prizes which include the Landau Prize (USSR Academy, 1980), Landau Gold Medal (Russian Academy, 2008) and the Feenberg Memorial Award in Many body Physics (1997). He received an Honorary Doctorate of the Technion in 2010. Lev Pitaevskii continued to publish valued research also in the last years of his activity.
For the obituary published in Physics Today visit:
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/76/3/61/2868054/Lev-Petrovich-Pitaevskii