Born into a Jewish family in Kharkov,
Kharkov Governorate,
Russian Empire (now Kharkiv,
Ukraine). Lifshitz is well known in the field of
general relativity for coauthoring the
BKL conjecture concerning the nature of a
generic curvature singularity. , this is widely regarded as one of the most important open problems in the subject of classical gravitation. With
Lev Landau, Lifshitz co-authored
Course of Theoretical Physics, an ambitious series of physics textbooks, in which the two aimed to provide a graduate-level introduction to the entire field of physics. These books are still considered invaluable and continue to be widely used. Lifshitz was the second of only 43 people ever to pass Landau's "Theoretical Minimum" examination. He made many invaluable contributions, in particular to quantum electrodynamics, where he calculated the
Casimir force in an arbitrary macroscopic configuration of metals and dielectrics. Since 1975, a special
multicritical point, the
Lifshitz point, carries his name. ==Bibliography==