Lev Landau: Impure Science

Lev Landau (born January 22, 1908)

Lev Landau’s biography is shrouded in legend, myth, and firsthand accounts that seem beyond belief. His is the story of an ideal scientist. In essence, it is the story of what it means to be a true scholar.

A renowned physicist, he was perhaps one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, although, having a penchant for classification, he ranked himself a 2.0 among physicists, putting himself in a class below Niels Bohr (in whose Institute for Theoretical Physics Landau worked as a young man) and the other fathers of quantum mechanics, whom he assigned a 1.0 (he gave Einstein a 0.5).