Landau’s influence runs through every physics department on earth — in the textbooks students still open, the school he built, and the institute, crater and asteroid that carry his name.
The Nobel citation reads, verbatim: “for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium.”
1946, 1949, 1953
German Physical Society
Low-temperature physics
With Lifshitz, for the Course of Theoretical Physics
“For his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium.”
He was also a foreign member of the Danish, Dutch, French and American academies, and held three Orders of Lenin.
His students founded the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics (1965) near Moscow, still one of the world’s leading theory centres. His name is carried by a crater on the far side of the Moon, by asteroid 2142 Landau, by the Russian Academy’s Landau Gold Medal, and by postage stamps in the USSR, Russia and his native Azerbaijan. A 2019 Google Doodle marked his 111th birthday.
Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt. Lev Landau
He wanted physics to be alive — fearless, unpretentious, alert to the real world rather than to its own formalism. He gave it superfluids and quasiparticles, a school of brilliant students and ten volumes that still teach the subject. The car crash took his physics; it could not take the physics he had already given everyone else.