Isaak Khalatnikov was born into a
Ukrainian Jewish family in Yekaterinoslav (now
Dnipro,
Ukraine) and graduated from
Dnipropetrovsk State University with a degree in Physics in 1941. He had been a member of the
Communist Party since 1944. He earned his doctorate in 1952. His wife Valentina was the daughter of Revolutionary hero
Mykola Shchors. Much of Khalatnikov's research was a collaboration with, or inspired by,
Lev Landau, including the
Landau-Khalatnikov theory of
superfluidity. During 1969 he briefly worked as a part-time professor of theoretical physics at
Leiden University. In 1970, inspired by the
mixmaster model introduced by
Charles W. Misner, then at
Princeton University, Khalatnikov, together with
Vladimir Belinski and
Evgeny Lifshitz, introduced what has become known as the
BKL conjecture, which is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding open problems in the classical theory of
gravitation. Khalatnikov directed the
Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Moscow from 1965 to 1992. He was elected to the
Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1984. He has been awarded the
Landau Gold Medal, the
Humboldt Prize, and the Marcel Grossmann Award. He was also a foreign member of the
Royal Society of London. He was portrayed by actor Georg Nikoloff in the film
The Theory of Everything. Khalatnikov died in
Chernogolovka on 9 January 2021, aged 101. ==Honours and awards==