HistoryTimelineLayer:Life of Lev Landau

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sources: Lev Landau events: Life of Lev Landau;Lev Landau;;;01.22.1908;04.01.1968; Landau was born to Jewish parents in Baku, Azerbaijan, in what was then the Russian Empire.;;;;01.22.1908;; Landau graduated in 1920 at age 13 from gymnasium. His parents considered him too young to attend university, so for a year he attended the Baku Economical Technical School.;;;;1920;; In 1922, at age 14, Landau matriculated at the Baku State University, studying in two departments simultaneously: the Departments of Physics and Mathematics, and the Department of Chemistry. Subsequently, he ceased studying chemistry, but remained interested in the field throughout his life.;;;;1922;; In 1924, Landau moved to the main centre of Soviet physics at the time: the Physics Department of Leningrad State University, where he dedicated himself to the study of theoretical physics, graduating in 1927.;;;;1924;; Landau subsequently enrolled for post-graduate studies at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute where he eventually received a doctorate in Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1934.;;;;1927;; Landau got his first chance to travel abroad during the period 1929–1931, on a Soviet government—People's Commissariat for Education—travelling fellowship supplemented by a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.;;;;1929;; After brief stays in Göttingen and Leipzig, Landau went to Copenhagen on 8 April 1930 to work at the Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics. He stayed there until 3 May of the same year. After the visit, Landau always considered himself a pupil of Niels Bohr and Landau's approach to physics was greatly influenced by Bohr.;;;;04.08.1930;; After his stay in Copenhagen, Landau visited Cambridge (mid-1930), where he worked with Paul Dirac.;;;;1930;; From Zurich Landau went back to Copenhagen for the third time and stayed there from 25 February until 19 March 1931 before returning to Leningrad the same year.;;;;02.25.1931;; Between 1932 and 1937, Landau headed the Department of Theoretical Physics at the National Scientific Center Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, and he lectured at the University of Kharkov and the Kharkov Polytechnical Institute. Apart from his theoretical accomplishments, Landau was the principal founder of a great tradition of theoretical physics in Kharkov, Ukraine, 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 Kharkiv, but he managed to leave for Moscow to take up a new post.;;;;1932;; In 1932, Landau computed the Chandrashekhar limit\; however, he did not apply it to white dwarf stars.;;;;1932;; From 1937 until 1962, Landau was the head of the Theoretical Division at the Institute for Physical Problems.;;;;1937;; Landau was arrested for a leaflet which compared Stalinism to German Nazism and Italian Fascism. He was held in the NKVD's Lubyanka prison until his release, on 29 April 1939,;;;;04.27.1938;; Landau was released from prison, after Pyotr Kapitsa, an experimental low-temperature physicist and the founder and head of the institute, wrote a letter to Joseph Stalin in which he personally vouched for Landau's behaviour and threatened to quit the institute if Landau were not released. After his release, Landau discovered how to explain Kapitsa's superfluidity using sound waves, or phonons, and a new excitation called a roton.;;;;04.29.1939;; Landau led a team of mathematicians supporting Soviet atomic and hydrogen bomb development. He calculated the dynamics of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, including predicting the yield. For this work Landau received the Stalin Prize in 1949 and 1953, and was awarded the title "Hero of Socialist Labour" in 1954.;;;;1949;; Landau received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below 2.17 K (−270.98&\;nbsp\;°C).";;;;1962;; On 7 January 1962, Landau's car collided with an oncoming truck. He was severely injured and spent two months in a coma. Although Landau recovered in many ways, his scientific creativity was destroyed, and he never returned fully to scientific work. His injuries prevented him from accepting the 1962 Nobel Prize for physics in person.;;;;01.07.1962;; In 1965 former students and co-workers of Landau founded the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, located in the town of Chernogolovka near Moscow, and led for the following three decades by Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov.;;;;1965;; In June 1965, Lev Landau and Yevsei Liberman published a letter in the New York Times, stating that as Soviet Jews they opposed U.S. intervention on behalf of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.;;;;06.1965;; Landau died, aged 60, from complications of the injuries sustained in the car accident he was involved in six years earlier. He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.;;;;04.01.1968;;