Celebrating famous Jews from Ukraine: Lev Landau
“Beware, he bites!” A plate with such an inscription on the office door at the Kharkiv University was nailed by Lev Landau.
He was strict as a scientist and joyful at the same time. Those who passed his so-called “theoretical minimum” officially became theoretical physicists and received the right to call the teacher Dau. Dozens of these Dau school theoreticians became over time the scientific pride of many countries of the world.
Landau, like Simon Kuznets, were not Kharkiv natives since birth. But it was Kharkiv that helped them to make the discoveries that subsequently led them to the Nobel Prize, and made them truly great. Landau turned Kharkiv in the 1930s into one of the world’s leading centers of theoretical physics. This was the prime time of the branches of physics, which became the basis for the future atomic programs in Europe and the world.
It was in Kharkiv, when for the first time in the USSR, the atomic nucleus was split, and it was also there in 1940 that the first atomic weapon project was developed. Thanks to Lev Landau, Kharkiv became one of the leading players in this field.
—
Join me, Boris Lozhkin, on Twitter @lozhkin_boris for news and commentary on Judaism in Ukraine and around the world. Follow me on Facebook for updates on the work of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine.
Find out more about my work at borislozhkin.org