Lev Vaidman

Lev Vaidman was born in 1955 in Saint Petersburg

Lev Vaidman was born on 4 September 1955 in Saint Petersburg to Shmuel and Polina Vaidman. His father was a civil engineer and his mother a mechanical engineer. He has two sisters, Nela and Vera.

He attended the 45th Physics-Mathematics School and won first place in the Soviet physics olympiad in 1971 and second place in 1972. He then studied physics for one year at Leningrad University. In 1973, at age 18, he immigrated to Israel with his family.

He studied at Ben-Gurion University and then earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1976. He then served in the IDF as an Air Force officer. He earned a master's degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1982 and a doctorate from Tel Aviv University in 1987, working with Yakir Aharonov.

In 1993 he and Avshalom Elitzur proposed a thought experiment on interaction-free measurement, later performed in the lab. With Aharonov he developed the two-state vector formalism and worked on weak and protective measurements. He also worked on quantum teleportation and supports the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.