Tamm, Igor Yevgenevich

(1895–1971)

   Russian physicist and Nobel laureate, 1958. Tamm received his scientific education at the Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1918. During the 1920s and early 1930s Tamm’s work in the Soviet Union concerned the dispersal of light in solid bodies. It was for his explanation (1937) of the phenomena known as ‘Cerenkov radiation’ - a pale blue light produced by gamma radiation passing through certain media - that he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1958. In 1927 Tamm was appointed a professor at the Moscow State University and from 1934 directed the Lebedye Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After World War II, Tamm joined many of the world’s leading physicists in demanding the limitation of nuclear power to peaceful uses.