Early life and education
Igor Tamm is remembered in physics for work that changed what the next generation was able to take for granted.
Igor Tamm was born at Vladivostok in 1895. His recorded nationality is Russia. He was educated at Lomonosov Moscow State University and MSU Faculty of Physics.
Around the turn of the twentieth century the sciences fractured into specialisms and simultaneously became national assets, funded and directed on a scale no earlier generation had seen.
Professional career
His working life was spent at Lebedev Physical Institute, Lomonosov Moscow State University and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where the work centred on theoretical physics.
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Take the IQ test →Among his principal works are Cherenkov radiation and Frank–Tamm formula. Physics advances when somebody insists on measuring what everyone else has been content to assume.
Scientific contributions and recognition
The range is worth noting. Igor Tamm published across physics and genetics - a breadth that was ordinary in this period and has become almost impossible since.
That the work was done from Russia matters to the story. Science has never been evenly distributed, and where a person is based has always shaped which problems are reachable and whose results get read.
Recognition followed: Nobel Prize in Physics (1958).
What that record amounts to is a body of physics that later workers could build on without re-checking. That is the practical test of a scientific life, and it is a harder one than fame.
Later years and legacy
Some of his own words survive, and they are collected on this page below.
Igor Tamm died in 1971, aged 76. What survives is not the reputation but the result: the part of physics that no longer has to be argued for.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics — 1958
- Notable work: Cherenkov radiation
- Notable work: Frank–Tamm formula
- Held posts at Lebedev Physical Institute, Lomonosov Moscow State University and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
- Educated at Lomonosov Moscow State University, MSU Faculty of Physics and University of Edinburgh
- Fields of research: theoretical physics
