Along with Theodore Holstein, Primakoff also developed the Holstein–Primakoff transformation which is designed to treat spin waves as bosonic excitations.
His father Chaim Primakov (a pharmacist) and his mother Maryem Primakova (nee Katz)[5] were married in the office of the Municipal Rabbi of Odesa on June 30, 1913.
[6] His mother and his grandparents decided to escape from Russia to the United States, through Romania and later Germany, where they finally took a steamship.
[7] In 1940 he worked at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, subsequently at the Queens College, and then at Washington University in St. Louis starting in 1946.
[7] During World War II, J. Robert Oppenheimer tried to convince him to join the Manhattan Project, but Primakoff declined due the short time to make the atomic bomb.