Lev Landau

Origins and early life

Lev Davidovich Landau was born in Baku, now in Azerbaijan, on 22 January 1908, the son of David Landau, an oil engineer, and of Lyubov Garkavi-Landau, a doctor. He was born into a Jewish family, went from 1913 to the Jewish kindergarten of Baku and then to the city's Jewish gymnasium, where his mother taught natural science, and finished school at thirteen.

Work and career

He entered university in Baku at fourteen, moved to Leningrad in 1924, and from 1929 to 1931 worked abroad, above all with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, whose pupil he always considered himself. From 1932 to 1937 he led theoretical physics in Kharkov, where he set the exam known as the Theoretical Minimum and began, with Evgeny Lifshitz, the ten-volume Course of Theoretical Physics still used today. In 1937 Pyotr Kapitsa brought him to the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow; arrested in April 1938 and held in the Lubyanka prison, he was freed a year later after Kapitsa vouched for him and Niels Bohr wrote to Stalin.

Kapitsa had found that liquid helium near absolute zero flows without friction, and in 1941 Landau explained this superfluidity by treating the whole liquid quantum mechanically, its excitations as quasiparticles. He also gave the theory of phase transitions in 1936, with Vitaly Ginzburg a theory of superconductivity, and from 1956 to 1958 the theory of liquid helium-3.

Recognition

On 7 January 1962 his car hit a truck and he spent two months in a coma; that year he received, alone, the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium. Unable to travel to Stockholm, he received the prize on 10 December 1962 from the Swedish ambassador in Moscow, and although he recovered in many ways, he never fully returned to science. He died in Moscow on 1 April 1968, aged sixty, of complications from his injuries, and was buried in the Novodevichy cemetery.