Lev Landau — physics (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Lev Landau was a Soviet theoretical physicist born in Baku who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962 for his work on superfluidity of liquid helium. He is the author — with Evgeny Lifshitz — of the ten-volume Course of Theoretical Physics, still considered the most comprehensive physics textbook ever written.
Tracing the roots — Baku (Azerbaijan)
Born in Baku (Russian Empire, now Azerbaijan) in 1908, Landau studied at Leningrad State University and briefly worked with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen before returning to the USSR. He was arrested by Stalin's NKVD in 1938 and spent a year in prison before Pyotr Kapitsa secured his release. He received the Nobel Prize while in a coma from a car accident — the only Nobel laureate ever to do so.
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Baku (Azerbaijan). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt."