ABSTRACT
I was very lucky in my life: for roughly 25 years, I worked with a fantastically interesting person and absolutely exceptional scientist-Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich. The breadth of his scientific interests is truly amazing: catalysis, the theory of combustion and detonation, adsorption, as well as elementary particles and nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology, relativity theory and quantum mechanics. And he was strong, universal in each of these
areas. As the 70th birthday of Yakov Borisovich approached, I felt strongly that a collection of his scientific works should be published, because no one had ever before demonstrated such a variety of work as that which he created over the course of his lifetime. The president of the USSR Academy of Sciences, A.P.Aleksandrov, enthusiastically supported my idea, and asked that he be included among the editors of the collection. A relatively large editorial board was organized, due to the need to work with research related to a huge circle of questions. The improbably broad range of topics represented in the two-volume publication, which came out in time for Zeldovich’s anniversary, is noted by everyone who reads it. It wasn’t for nothing that, when Yakov
Borisovich was introduced to the English physicist Stephen Hawking at a conference in Budapest in the 1970s, Hawking remarked that he was now finally convinced that Zeldovich’s work had been done by a single person, and not a collective, like the Bourbaki.
