Yuri Golfand

Golfand was a Soviet Jewish physicist who, with his student Evgeny Likhtman in a 1971 paper at Moscow's Lebedev Institute, first proposed four-dimensional supersymmetry, a symmetry between bosons and fermions now central to theoretical physics. Fired in 1973 and refused an exit visa for years as a Jewish 'refusenik', he finally emigrated to Israel in 1990 and worked at the Technion. His pioneering idea underpins much of modern high-energy theory.