Maria Afanasyevna Levitskaya (1.04.1883 —6.03.1963) was a Soviet physicist and a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (1935). She was born in Tashkent. She graduated from the Higher Courses for Women in St Petersburg (1906). She continued her education at the University of Berlin (1905—06) and the University of Göttingen (1911 — 14). In 1915 — 17 she worked at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, in 1920 —23 at Central Asian University in Tashkent and in 1923 —34 at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, and in 1935 —62 she was professor at Voronezh University.
Her research concerned the generation of short electromagnetic waves, solid-state physics, X-ray structural analysis, infrared spectroscopy and nuclear physics. She obtained waves considerably shorter than 1 mm.