Best known as the author of Worlds in Collision (1950). He was born in Russia, emigrated to the United States in 1939, and emigrated again to Byelorus while it was still part of the USSR. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and Moscow universities, qualifying in 1921, then practicing in Pales¬ tine. In the 1930s he studied psychology, first in Zurich and later in Vienna. He was both a psychoanalyst and an astronomer. Between 1921 and 1924, he worked with Einstein, editing the Scripta Universitatis at the Bibliothecae Hierosolymitarum, the institution that later became the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In addition to his best known work, Velikovsky published, on similar lines, Earth in Upheaval (1955). He also wrote Ages in Chaos (1952), a chronology of the Middle East in the pre-Christian era, and Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960), in which he argued that the Pharaoh Akhnaton was the prototype of the mythological Greek character.