Igor Tamm

Tamm was an atheist.

On April 12, 1971, he passed away in Moscow at the age of 75 years.

He was born on July 8, 1895, in Vladivostok, Russian Empire to Evgenij Tamm and his wife Olga Davydova. His father was an electrical engineer who worked in Yelizavetgrad (presently Kirovohrad, Ukraine), designated to build and manage water systems and electric power stations.

He attended a gymnasium in Yelizavetgrad and thereafter went to the United Kingdom where he studied at the ‘University of Edinburg’ in 1913-14 along with his school friend Boris Hessen who became philosopher, physicist and historian of science.

In 1914, at the very outset of the First World War, he offered volunteer service as a field medical person in the army.

He was a very strong willed person from a young age and was staunchly against participation of Russia in the World War I. In this pursuit he got associated with the ongoing Revolutionary movement in 1917 and remained an active campaigner against the war. Following the March Revolution that year he served the revolutionary committees. He never took up weapons, but faced incarceration several times.

In 1918 he completed his BS in physics from the ‘Moscow State University’.

Tamm completed his first scientific paper in 1923, entitled ‘Electrodynamics of the Anisotropic Medium in the Special Theory of Relativity’.

He joined the ‘Moscow State University’ in 1924, as a lecturer in its physics department. He went on to hold the chair of theoretical physics at the university succeeding his mentor Leonid I. Mandelstam.

He was one of the foreign scientists who worked with famous Austrian and Dutch theoretical physicist Paul Ehrenfest for few months in 1928 in the latter’s laboratory at the ‘Leiden University’ (LEI), the oldest university in Netherlands.

He published his paper conceptualising surface states, the electronic states found at the surface of materials, in 1932, which became a significant concept for ‘MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) physics. The surface states which are calculated on the basis of a tight-binding model are frequently called amm states. That year he also introduced the concept of phonon.

The Russian Academy of Sciences elected him as a corresponding member in 1933.

He received the ‘Nobel Prize in Physics’ in 1958 jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for explaining the real cause behind the Cherenkov radiation.