The Swedish Royal Academy of Science announced on 1 November that it had named a leading Soviet physicist, Lev Davydovich Landau, to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1962. Prof. Landau, a theorist who has made significant contributions in widely separated areas of physics, was cited in particular for having developed “pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium.”
Born in the port city of Baku, on the shore of the Caspian Sea, he was accepted as a student by Baku University at the age of fourteen, and he completed his studies at the University of Leningrad in 1927, at the age of nineteen, by which time he had also supplied a new mathematical tool for quantum mechanics—the concept of the density matrix. After two years of research at the Physicotechnical Institute in Leningrad, he was given the opportunity to visit a number of European laboratories, including the Institute...
