Lev Landau — physics (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Lev Davidovich Landau was born on 22 January 1908 in Baku, then in the Russian Empire, now in Azerbaijan, to Jewish parents: David Lvovich Landau, an engineer in the Baku oil fields, and Lyubov Garkavi-Landau, a doctor. He lived and worked all his life in the Soviet Union.
At fourteen he entered Baku University, studying physics and mathematics and chemistry at once, and in 1924 moved to Leningrad University, graduating in 1927 at nineteen; he then joined the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute as a graduate student. A scholarship took him abroad in 1929-31, where in Berlin he met Albert Einstein and in Copenhagen worked at Niels Bohr's institute.
In 1932 he became head of the theoretical department of the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkov, now Kharkiv, and lectured at the university and the polytechnic. There he founded what became known as the Landau school and with his former student Evgeny Lifshitz began the Course of Theoretical Physics, ten volumes covering the whole subject, still used by graduate students and translated into some twenty languages. He set his students a famous examination sequence, the "theoretical minimum".
In 1937 he moved to Moscow to head the theoretical division of Pyotr Kapitsa's Institute for Physical Problems. On 27 April 1938 he was arrested and held for a year; he was released on 29 April 1939 after Kapitsa wrote to the Soviet leadership on his behalf. Kapitsa had just discovered the superfluidity of liquid helium, and in 1941 Landau published the quantum theory that explained it. His students included Alexei Abrikosov, Lev Pitaevskii, Isaak Khalatnikov and Lev Gorkov; he also worked on the Soviet atomic project, received the Lenin Prize and was a Hero of Socialist Labour.
On 7 January 1962, on the road from Moscow to Dubna, his car collided with a truck, and he was gravely injured. That year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering theories of condensed matter, especially liquid helium; it was presented to him in Moscow by the Swedish ambassador. He did not return to research and died in Moscow on 1 April 1968, aged sixty, of complications from his injuries.
Tracing the roots — Baku, Baku Governorate (now Azerbaijan)
Born on 22 January 1908 in Baku, Caucasus Viceroyalty, Russian Empire (now Azerbaijan), Landau studied at Leningrad university and worked briefly with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen before returning to the USSR. Arrested by the NKVD on 27 April 1938, he was released on 29 April 1939 after Pyotr Kapitsa secured his release.
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Baku, Baku Governorate (now 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."