Moscow State University Mark Yakovlevich Azbel (Russian: Марк Яковлевич Азбель; 12 May 1932 — 31 March 2020) was a Soviet and Israeli physicist.
Azbel was born in 1932, in Kharkiv (at the time, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) to a family of physicians.
[8][9] In 1964 he began working at Moscow State University and concurrently as a section chair at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Having been refused exit permission from the Soviet Union, he participated in the movement of refuseniks in the USSR in the mid-seventies.
In an important 1964 article,[12] Azbel made conjectures about the nature of the Harper spectrum which contributed to the discovery of the Hofstadter butterfly in 1974.