- Person
- Lev Landau
- Lived
- 1908–1968
- Field
- Theoretical Physics
- From
- Soviet
The story
In 1932 Lev Landau moved to Kharkiv to lead the theoretical department of the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute, where he founded a school of theoretical physics. One of his most talented students was Evgeny Lifshitz, a young physicist from a Jewish family in Kharkiv who began doctoral work under him in 1933 and was the second person ever to pass Landau's famously demanding 'Theoretical Minimum' examinations. MacTutor describes Lifshitz as an exceptionally talented writer.
Together they began an ambitious project: a series of textbooks that would set out the whole of theoretical physics in a single, coherent sequence. The early parts grew out of lecture notes, and it is said that Landau composed much of the series in his head while held in a Soviet prison in 1938 and 1939. Most of the actual writing of the early volumes was done by Lifshitz, while the physical insight was Landau's, a partnership that worked brilliantly.
The Course of Theoretical Physics grew to ten volumes, covering mechanics, classical field theory, quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum theory, statistical physics, fluid mechanics, elasticity, electrodynamics of continuous media and physical kinetics. The first eight volumes were finished in the 1950s and translated into English from the late 1950s, partly by the physicist John Stewart Bell. In 1962 Landau and Lifshitz received the Lenin Prize for the Course, the first time the prize had been awarded for the teaching of physics.
Landau was gravely injured in a car accident that year and never returned to creative work. Lifshitz carried the project on with colleagues, including Vladimir Berestetskii and Lev Pitaevskii, and the last volumes were completed years after Landau's death in 1968.
Known simply as 'Landau and Lifshitz', the volumes have appeared in many editions in Russian, English, French, German and other languages, and an estimated million copies had been sold by 2005. Reviewers have called the series renowned and celebrated, and at a centenary celebration of Landau's career it was praised for its unprecedented longevity. It remains a standard graduate-level text, prized for its depth and economy.
Why it matters
For decades physicists around the world have learned their subject from Landau and Lifshitz, making it one of the most influential science textbook series ever written.
About Lev Landau
Baku-born prodigy who founded the great Soviet school of theoretical physics, survived Stalin’s prison, explained superfluid helium and won the 1962 Nobel Prize.
More about Lev Landau
- Lev Landau predicted a strange way plasma waves fadeIn 1946 Lev Landau predicted that waves in a plasma can lose energy without any collisions, an effect confirmed experimentally in 1964 and now called Landau damping.
- Landau co-discovered the quantum density matrixIn the late 1920s, while still a teenager, Lev Landau independently introduced the density matrix, a basic tool of quantum physics, alongside John von Neumann.
- Lev Landau explained frictionless superfluid heliumLev Landau explained why liquid helium flows without friction below 2.17 K, introducing phonons and 'rotons'; it won him the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Landau's Fermi liquid theory explains metalsIn 1956 Lev Landau introduced Fermi liquid theory, explaining why electrons in metals and atoms in liquid helium-3 behave almost like free particles.
- The Ginzburg–Landau theory explains superconductorsLev Landau and Vitaly Ginzburg created the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, work that helped win Ginzburg and Landau's student Abrikosov the 2003 Nobel Prize.
- Landau levels underpin the quantum Hall effectIn 1930 Lev Landau showed that electrons in a magnetic field occupy discrete energy levels, now called Landau levels, key to explaining the quantum Hall effect.
- Landau's 'Theoretical Minimum' trained a generationLev Landau's famous 'Theoretical Minimum' exams, passed by only 43 candidates from 1934 to 1961, created the Soviet Union's greatest school of theoretical physics.
- Landau's theory explains how matter changes stateLev Landau's theory of second-order phase transitions introduced the 'order parameter', still a broad and powerful framework for how matter changes state.
Sources
- Lev Landau Wikipedia
- Lev Davidovich Landau MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
- Course of Theoretical Physics Wikipedia
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