The friendship equation

Some people know him for his physics studies, for his books published in the Landau-Lifshitz series, or the equation that bears his name and that describes the dynamics of an ultracold boson system. Above all, however, he was someone to whom many people were bound by long-lasting friendship and scientific collaboration. These people, together, like different wavelengths and frequencies, helped to describe Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii and the special relationship he had with the University of Trento. The ceremony to name room A104 of Polo Ferrari 1 after the Russian physicist took place today in Povo amid admiration and nostalgia.

The event opened with an address by rector Flavio Deflorian and the speeches of Gianluca Lattanzi, director of the Department of Physics, and Sandro Stringari, professor emeritus of the University of Trento, a friend of Pitaevskii, and proponent of the dedication.

The speeches recalled the most important moments of the Russian scientist's career and focused on his scientific collaborations with the group of the Department of Physics of Trento and with other Italian and foreign laboratories.

The ceremony continued with a video message from Eric Cornell, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, who recalled the scientific profile of the Russian physicist who loved Trentino as a second homeland and chose to live in Povo and be buried in the cemetery of Trento.

Later Francesca Ferlaino, professor at the University of Innsbruck, held a colloquium on "When Crystals Flow: The Emergence of Supersolid Quantum States". She has been working for years with the Bose-Einstein Condensation-BEC Center in Trento on common research topics and collaborates with the Italian Association of Physics Students in the organization of the "Trento-Innsbruck Quantum Information Tour", a week-long event in which students can visit the laboratories of the two universities. Ferlaino highlighted Lev Pitaevskii's legacy in the evolution of quantum physics.

The meeting concluded with a reading of "Lev Pitaevskii's life in Moscow", narrated by two friends who had also accompanied him during his time in Trentino: Marina Sakharov Liberman, vice-president of the Andrei Sakharov foundation –  dedicated to Marina's grandfather, Russian physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, which supports human rights initiatives worldwide – and Mikhail Liberman, professor at the University of Stockholm, who had been friends with Lev Pitaevskii since their time together at the Kapitza Institute in Moscow.

Lev Pitaevskii (Saratov, 18 January 1933 – Rovereto, 23 August 2022), who trained at the Landau school, was one of the most eminent theoretical physicists in the world in the field of statistical physics and physics of condensed matter. At the end of the 1980s, while based in Moscow, he began a scientific collaboration with Sandro Stringari in Trento, which led to an invitation to teach in Trento. After moving permanently to Povo, he remained a professor at the University of Trento from 1998 until his retirement in 2008, but his research continued intensively in the following years.

In 2022, the Bec Center, where he had led many studies together with colleagues from the Physics Department of UniTrento and the National Institute of Optics of the National Research Council, was renamed the Pitaevskii Bec Center.

Now the University has decided to name a classroom after him, as a place where knowledge is passed down to the next generations. The naming "aims to honour the memory of Professor Lev Pitaevskii, recognising the prestige he has given to the University and keeping his memory alive", states the motivation.

The naming proposition started with a letter from Professor Sandro Stringari, a long-time friend of Pitaevskii, to the Physics Department Council, which obtained the support of the departments that are housed at the Ferrari campus, i.e. the departments of Industrial Engineering; Information Engineering and Computer Science; Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology; Mathematics. After the resolution of the Department Council of 17 December 2025, the proposal needed the approval of the Academic Senate.

"Professor Pitaevskii was an esteemed researcher and professor of the Department of Physics for more than twenty years and his human and professional legacy is still strongly felt in the academic community of the University of Trento. Moreover, his scientific work is of exceptional importance at the national and international level, as demonstrated by the fact that the name of the famous Gross-Pitaevskii equation is mentioned almost a thousand times in the title of the scientific publications indexed in Web of Science," reads the resolution of the Academic Senate that gave the final approval to the dedication on 14 January 2026.