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Yuri Golfand

Yuri Golfand was a Soviet and Israeli physicist who, with his student Evgeny Likhtman, proposed supersymmetry in a 1971 paper.

1922 to 1994Proposing supersymmetryThe super-Poincaré algebraBeing a Soviet refusenik

Born: 10 January 1922, Kharkiv
Died: 17 February 1994, Jerusalem
Occupation: theoretical physicist, physicist, mathematician
Education: Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty, St. Petersburg State University

Yuri Golfand was born in 1922 in Kharkiv

Yuri Abramovich Golfand was born on January 10, 1922, in Kharkiv.

He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Leningrad State University in 1947.

Golfand worked at the Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow from 1951 to 1973. In 1971 he and Likhtman extended the Poincaré algebra with anticommuting spinor generators, proposing a supersymmetry between bosons and fermions. The same paper presented the first four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge field theory, a supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics.

He was a refusenik. He was fired from the institute in 1973 and returned to work there from 1980 to 1990.

After 18 years of waiting, he received permission to leave the Soviet Union and emigrated to Israel in 1990. He worked at the Technion in Haifa and died on February 17, 1994.