Nobel Prize Recipient. Lev Davidovich Landau, a Soviet physicist, received worldwide recognition after receiving the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics. He received the coveted award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for his pioneering theories for condensed matter, especially liquid helium." Well-known in the scientific community, he received 21 nominations for the Nobel candidacy. Through his career his name appears on many theories and discoveries, but it was the development of a mathematical theory of superfluity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below −270.98 Celsius that made him well-known. Born into a family of Jewish ancestry, his mother was a physician and his father an engineer. He was recognized as a mathematical prodigy with some behavioral problems as a child. Receiving his education during the unstable years of the Russian Revolution of 1917, he did not formally graduate from high school or write a thesis for a doctorate degree. He did complete undergraduate physics at Leningrad State University. He published a research paper in Germany in 1924. Schooling in the USSR was not stable until 1934. In 1934 he was granted a doctorate as he was already an established scholar, being self-taught. He began his scientific career at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute. He received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow scholarship, traveling to western Europe for two years and studying under Nobel Prize recipients Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr. His German, French, Danish and English became fluent. In 1932 he was made the head of the Theoretical Department of the Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute at Kharkov, continuing his research and publishing more papers. A political move, he was transferred to be the head of the Theoretical Department of the Institute for Physical Problems of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. in Moscow. During the Joseph Stalin's "Great Purge," several of his colleagues at Ukrainian Physico-Technical Institute at Kharkov were arrested and later executed. During this time, he was placed under surveillance by the KGB and was arrested on April 27, 1938 after discussing an anti-Stalinist leaflet with two colleagues. One year later, Landau was released from Lubyanka Prison only after the founder of the Institute for Physical Problems of the Academy of Sciences, Pyotr Kapitsa, wrote several letters to the prime minister, forcibly declaring that Landau was needed for vital research in liquid helium. A quantum theoretical explanation of Kapitsa's discovery of superfluidity in liquid helium was published by Landau in 1941. In 1946 he was elected a full member of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. He organized a group of young scientists, after giving the candidates challenging examination, called the "Landau Minimum." Although there were hundreds of candidates, only 42 candidates passed the examination. The second one to pass "Landau Minimum" was Evgeny Lifshitz. Embracing practically every branch of theoretical physics, the group reported back to him weekly on their research projects. He led a team of mathematicians supporting Soviet atomic and hydrogen bomb development. He co-authored with Lifshitz part of a 10-volume series of textbooks "Course of Theoretical Physics," which was a major learning tool for several generations of research students worldwide. The series was not completed until 1979. Even with worldwide recognized achievements, he feared for his life. With Stalin's 1953 death, he felt at ease and no longer pushed to do research to maintain his personal protection. Besides the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, he was elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in London, the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences, Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Physical Society in London, and the Physical Society of France. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received from Germany the Max Planck Medal and the Fritz London Prize in 1961, the Stalin Prize in 1949 and 1953, the medal of the Hero of Socialist Labor in 1954 and the Lenin Prize in 1962. He was one of four who received the Lev Landau Prize in 1974 for work on the singularities of cosmological solutions of the gravitational equations, which was presented in sixteen papers between 1961 and 1985. In 1938 he married but considered the marriage to be "opened" to other relationships. On January 7, 1962 he received a closed head injury from an automobile vs truck head-on accident. He was not able to accept his Nobel Prize in person as he was recuperating. He never fully recovered, was not able to return to his work, and eventually, dying six years later from the complications related to the accident. In 1965 his laboratory was renamed Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics.