George Gamow

In 1931, Gamov was debarred from attending a scientific conference taking place in Italy, one event in a series of increasingly oppressive measures under the Soviet Union, which eventually inspired this cosmologist to defect and emigrate.

In 1931, he entered the wedlock with Lyubov Vokhmintseva, another physicist who was also working in the Soviet Union.

In 1935, the couple was blessed with a son, Igor Gamow; he became a naturalized citizen of the United States, where the esteemed physicist and his wife were then living.

On 4 March 1904, Gamow was born to Russian-Ukrainian parents in Odessa, formerly part of the Russian Empire (and currently the Ukraine).

Both of Gamow’s parents were school teachers; his father was a teacher of Russian language and literature at a local high school, while his mother worked as a teacher of history and geography at a girls’ school.

During his childhood, Gamow learned Russian (his mother tongue), French and German languages; he would later become fluent in English, his fourth language, during his late teen years.

In 1923, Gamow left Odessa for Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he studied at the ‘University of Leningrad’.

In 1929, completed his studies at the ‘University of Leningrad’, having worked largely under the guidance of Alexander Friedmann; following Friedmann’s death, however, Gamow was forced to change thesis advisors.

Beginning in his university years, Gamow formed a friendship was three other theoretical physics students, Lev Landau, Dmitri Ivanenko, and Matvey Bronshtein. Together, the group of four called themselves the “Three Musketeers.”

Following his graduation, Gamow moved to Göttingen, Germany, where he conducted research on quantum theory, focusing on the atomic nucleus.

From 1928 to 1931, Gamow worked at the ‘Theoretical Physics Institute’ at the ‘University of Copenhagen’, briefly interrupting his time at the Institute during collaborations with Ernest Rutherford at ‘Cavendish Laboratory’ at ‘Cambridge University’.

In 1928, Gamow proposed a solution to the theory of alpha decay based on quantum tunneling, working together with Nikolai Kochin to develop the explanation.

In 1947, Gamow wrote ‘One Two Three … Infinity’, a broad introduction to scientific themes from mathematics to biology, which is still largely credited as the most well received book in the genre of popular science.

Between 1940 and 1967, Gamow wrote a series of five popular science books about a character called “C.G.H. Tompkins”, with topics ranging from atomic structure to human biology.

In 1948, Gamow co-authored a paper with his student Ralph Alpher entitled ‘The Origin of Chemical Elements’, in which they explained how a Big Bang origin to the universe could explain the contemporary amounts of the elements hydrogen and helium.