Lev Landau

• 1. Introduction

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  Lev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of mind arrives at 13 already outpacing the curriculum? And what does it take to become, as many considered him, the greatest Soviet theoretical physicist who ever lived? The story begins with oil fields and a young prodigy, winds through the laboratories of Copenhagen, passes through a Soviet prison cell, and ends decades later at a hospital bedside. Between those points, Landau left his name on discoveries spanning nearly every corner of physics, from the coldest fluids ever studied to the deepest equations of plasma and quantum electrodynamics.

• 2. A Prodigy in Baku

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  Landau's father, David Lvovich Landau, worked as an engineer in the local oil industry. His mother, Lyubov Veniaminovna Garkavi-Landau, was a doctor. Both had come to Baku from Mogilev and both had graduated from the Mogilev gymnasium. By the time Lev finished gymnasium himself in 1920 at age 13, his parents judged him too young for university. He spent a year at the Baku Economical Technical School instead, a practical detour before enrolling at Baku State University in 1922 at age 14. There he studied in two departments simultaneously: Physics and Mathematics alongside Chemistry. He eventually dropped chemistry from his coursework, though he kept a personal interest in the field for the rest of his life. When he left Baku in 1924 for Leningrad, where the main centre of Soviet physics was then based, he was 16 years old and already operating at a level that would define the next decade of his career.

• 3. The Copenhagen Influence

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  On the 8th of April 1930, Landau arrived in Copenhagen to work at Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics. The visit lasted until the 3rd of May that same year, barely a month in duration, but its impact on Landau's thinking was permanent. He would spend the rest of his life describing himself as a pupil of Bohr. The European fellowship years, funded partly by the Soviet government's People's Commissariat for Education and partly by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, also took Landau to Gottingen, Leipzig, Cambridge, and Zurich. At Cambridge he worked with Paul Dirac; in Zurich he spent December 1930 through January 1931 alongside Wolfgang Pauli. He returned to Copenhagen a third time, staying from the 25th of February to the 19th of March 1931. By then he was fluent in German and French, functional in English, and was adding Danish to his range. The exposure to Bohr, Dirac, and Pauli, three figures at the very foundation of quantum mechanics, shaped the breadth and rigour that would mark Landau's entire scientific output.

• 4. The Kharkov School

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  Between 1932 and 1937, Landau headed the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Ukrainian Physics and Technology Institute in Kharkov, and he lectured at both the University of Kharkov and the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. It was in Kharkov that he and Evgeny Lifshitz, his friend and former student, began writing the Course of Theoretical Physics. The work eventually ran to ten volumes covering the entire subject, and graduate students around the world still use those books today. Also in Kharkov, Landau designed what he called the "Theoretical Minimum": a comprehensive exam covering every aspect of theoretical physics that candidates had to pass before being admitted to his school. Between 1934 and 1961, only 43 people passed it. Those 43 went on to become some of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of the twentieth century. Landau's students included Lev Pitaevskii, Alexei Abrikosov, Isaak Khalatnikov, Lev Gor'kov, and Roald Sagdeev, among others. The tradition he built in Kharkov became known simply as the "Landau school."

• 5. Prison, Kapitsa, and Superfluidity

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  On the 27th of April 1938, Landau was arrested. The charge stemmed from his possession of a leaflet comparing Stalinism to German Nazism and Italian Fascism. He was held in the NKVD's Lubyanka prison. His release, on the 29th of April 1939, came about because Pyotr Kapitsa, the experimental physicist who headed the Institute for Physical Problems, wrote directly to Joseph Stalin on Landau's behalf. Kapitsa personally vouched for Landau's conduct and threatened to resign from the institute if Landau was not freed. Bohr also wrote a letter. The intervention worked. Almost immediately after his release, Landau produced the explanation that had eluded Kapitsa: why liquid helium behaves as a superfluid. His answer rested on two types of excitation moving through the liquid, sound waves called phonons and a new type he named a roton. The Nobel Prize committee would recognize this specific work more than two decades later, awarding Landau the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his mathematical theory of superfluidity and its account of liquid helium II at temperatures below 2.17 Kelvin.

• 6. Weapons, Stalin Prizes, and Nuclear Work

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  Landau led a team of mathematicians supporting the development of Soviet atomic and hydrogen weapons. He calculated the dynamics of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb and predicted its yield. For this work he received the Stalin Prize in both 1949 and 1953, and in 1954 was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labour. His 1935 piece in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia, titled "Bourgeoisie and Contemporary Physics", had already made his political commitments visible: he criticized religious superstition and the dominance of capital, praising what he described as the Party and government's support for Soviet physics. Hendrik Casimir remembered Landau as a passionate communist. The KGB, in a 1957 report to the CPSU Central Committee, recorded his views on the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, Vladimir Lenin, and what Landau himself called "red fascism." His personal beliefs were complex and shifting, illustrated by an exchange with the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who asked whether Landau believed in God. Landau sat in silence for three minutes before answering, "I think so."

• 7. The Ranking of Physicists

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  Landau maintained a private list of physicists ranked on a logarithmic scale running from 0 to 5, measuring productivity and genius. Isaac Newton held the top position at 0. Albert Einstein sat at 0.5. A rank of 1 went to the founders of quantum mechanics: Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrodinger, and Satyendra Nath Bose, among others. Those at rank 5 Landau designated "pathologists." He placed himself at 2.5, then later revised his own score upward to a 2. The physicist N. David Mermin, writing about Landau, used the scale to describe his own standing, titling his tribute "My Life with Landau: Homage of a 4.5 to a 2." Landau also kept a second, lesser-known classification system using geometric diagrams. He divided scientists into four classes based on diagram shape, with a simple triangle at the top reserved for those he judged the most original and brilliant, a category that included Dirac and Einstein. The diagrams mapped tenacity along the bottom line and genius and originality along the top.

• 8. Accident and Legacy

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  On the 7th of January 1962, Landau's car collided with an oncoming truck. He spent two months in a coma. He recovered in many respects, but his capacity for scientific work did not return. His injuries meant he could not travel to accept the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year. He died on the 1st of April 1968, aged 60, from complications that traced back to that collision six years earlier. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery. In 1965, former students and colleagues had already founded the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka, a town near Moscow; Isaak Khalatnikov led it for the three decades that followed. The minor planet 2142 Landau and a lunar crater bear his name. The Russian Academy of Sciences named its highest prize in theoretical physics the Landau Gold Medal in his honour. On the 22nd of January 2019, Google marked what would have been his 111th birthday with a Google Doodle. His first published paper, co-authored with Dmitri Ivanenko in 1926 when Landau was 18, concerned the derivation of the Klein-Fock equation. His last, titled "Fundamental Problems," appeared in 1960 in a volume of tributes to Wolfgang Pauli.