Abstract

In this talk I will recall important aspects of the scientific life of Lev Pitaevskii, starting from the first years spent in Moscow, at the Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems, his relationships with Lev Landau and the collaborations with the other members of the Russian school. In addition to fundamental contributions to the theory of superfluidity and of the van der Waals forces, in 1961 he formulated the most famous Gross-Pitaevskii equation. He was later co-author of several books of the prestigious Landau-Lifshitz series.
In the second part of his life Lev Pitaeveskii moved to Trento where, after the first experimental realization of Bose-Einstein Condensation in 1995, he gave fundamental contributions to the theoretical research in the field of ultracold atomic gases, through a series of scientific collaborations involving the Trento BEC team as well as many laboratories around the world.