Boris Yakovlevich Zel'dovich

Boris Yakovlevich Zeldovich (; 23 April 1944 – 16 December 2018) was a Russian-American physicist and a son of the famous Soviet physicist Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich. He was doctor of the Physical and Mathematical sciences (from 1981) and a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1994 Zeldovich worked as a professor at the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida. for his contributions to the fields of non-linear optics, optical waveguide theory and optical holography. B.Zeldovich predicted and discovered, experimentally, the giant optical nonlinearity of liquid crystals, which is 1010 times stronger than for usual media and is the co-discoverer of optical phase conjugation. He died on 16 December 2018 at the age of 74.