Vadim Knizhnik

Vadim Genrikhovich Knizhnik (Russian: Вади́м Ге́нрихович Кни́жник; 20 February 1962, Kiev – 25 December 1987, Moscow) was a Soviet physicist of Jewish and Russian descent.
"Vadim studied physics from 1978 to 1984 at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology. He has received his PhD at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. His supervisor was Prof. A. Polyakov, however at the time of his PhD courses ("aspirantship") Vadim was already a first-class physicist and supervising him was a pure formality. In 1986 he became a member of the Landau Institute. His distinguished abilities showed quite early. At the secondary school he won twice the physics olympiad of the USSR. He wrote his first scientific paper (in collaboration with Prof. L. Andreev) as a student in 1982. This paper has dealt with kinetic properties of quantum crystals. From 1984 he turned to quantum field theory and made very important contributions to string theory."