Nobel Laureate, physicist Lev Landau's 111th birthday celebrated in a Google Doodle

Lev Landau, who received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity, is being celebrated by Google on his 111th birth anniversary in a doodle. Landau was born on this day on 1908.His theory of superfluidity accounts for the properties of liquid helium and its behaviour at extremely low temperatures.Besides this theory, he contributed to physics in various other ways. These include: the independent co-discovery of the density matrix method in quantum mechanics, the quantum mechanical theory of diamagnetism, the theory of second-order phase transitions, the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, the theory of Fermi liquid, the explanation of Landau damping in plasma physics, the Landau pole in quantum electrodynamics, the two-component theory of neutrinos, and Landau's equations for S matrix singularities.[caption id="attachment_5937681" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

Google Doodle for Lev Landau’s 111th Birthday. Image: Google[/caption]A Google Doodle is essentially a special version of the Google logo that appears on the homepage commemorating holidays, events, people and more.Google notes that Landau was described as a “quiet, shy boy” when young, and completed his studies by the age of 13, and began college. He published his first publication, On the Theory of the Spectra of Diatomic Molecules by the time he was 18.By 21, he was through with his Ph.D. and was elected to the USSR’s Academy of Sciences in 1946.His research was so broad that many concepts, an institute and even a crater on the moon is named after him.Landau died at the age of 60 on 1 April 1968. He was suffering from complications of the injuries sustained in the car accident he was involved in six years earlier.