Landau was born on January 22, 1908 to
Jewish parents
[2][3][4] in
Baku, in what was then the
Russian Empire. Landau's father was an engineer with the local oil industry and his mother was a doctor. Recognized very early as a
child prodigy in
mathematics, Landau was quoted as saying in later life that he scarcely remembered a time when he was not familiar with
calculus. Landau graduated at 13 from
gymnasium. His parents considered him too young to attend university, so for a year he attended the
Baku Economical Technicum. In 1922, at age 14, he matriculated at
Baku State University, studying in two departments simultaneously: the department of Physics and Mathematics, and the department of Chemistry. Subsequently he ceased studying chemistry, but remained interested in the field throughout his life.
In 1924, he moved to the main centre of Soviet physics at the time: the Physics Department of
Leningrad State University. In
Leningrad, he first made the acquaintance of genuine theoretical physics and dedicated himself fully to its study, graduating in 1927. Landau subsequently enrolled for post-graduate study at the
Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, and at 21, received a doctorate. Landau got his first chance to travel abroad in 1929, on a Soviet government traveling fellowship supplemented by a
Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.
After brief stays in
Göttingen and
Leipzig, he went to
Copenhagen to work at
Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics. After the visit, Landau always considered himself a pupil of
Niels Bohr and Landau's approach to physics was greatly influenced by Bohr. After his stay in Copenhagen, he visited
Cambridge and
Zürich before returning to the Soviet Union.
Between 1932 and 1937 he headed the department of theoretical physics at the
Kharkov Polytechnical Institute. Apart from his theoretical accomplishments, Landau was the principal founder of a great tradition of theoretical physics in
Kharkov,
Soviet Union, sometimes referred to as the "Landau school". In Kharkov, he and his friend and former student,
Evgeny Lifshitz, began writing the
Course of Theoretical Physics, ten volumes that together span the whole of the subject and are still widely used as
graduate-level physics texts. During the
Great Purge, Landau was investigated within the
UPTI Affair in
Kharkov, but he managed to leave for
Moscow to take up a new post.
[5]
Landau developed a comprehensive exam called the "Theoretical Minimum" which students were expected to pass before admission to the school. The exam covered all aspects of theoretical physics, and between 1934 and 1961 only 43 candidates passed.
Landau was the head of the Theoretical Division at the
Institute for Physical Problems from 1937 until 1962.
[6] Landau was arrested on April 27, 1938, because he had compared the Stalinist dictatorship with that of Hitler,
[5][7] and was held in the
NKVD's
Lubyanka prison until his release on April 29, 1939, after the head of the institute
Pyotr Kapitsa, an
experimental low-temperature physicist, wrote a letter to
Joseph Stalin, personally vouching for Landau's behavior, and threatening to quit the institute if Landau were not released.
[8] After his release Landau discovered how to explain Kapitza's superfluidity using sound waves, or phonons, and a new excitation called a roton.
[5]
Landau led a team of mathematicians supporting Soviet atomic and hydrogen bomb development. Landau calculated the dynamics of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, including predicting the yield. For this work he received the Stalin Prize in 1949 and 1953, and was awarded the title "Hero of Socialist Labor" in 1954.
[5]
His students included
Lev Pitaevskii,
Alexei Abrikosov,
Arkady Levanyuk,
Evgeny Lifshitz,
Lev Gor'kov,
Isaak Khalatnikov,
Boris L. Ioffe,
Roald Sagdeev and
Isaak Pomeranchuk.
