Ilya Lifshitz was born into a Ukrainian Jewish family in Kharkov, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire (now Kharkiv, Ukraine). Together with Arnold Kosevich, in 1954 Lifshitz established the connection between the oscillation of magnetic characteristics of metals and the form of an electronic surface of Fermi (Lifshitz–Kosevich formula) from de Haas–van Alphen experiments.