Ilya M. Frank
Frank, Ilya M. (1908-1990), a Russian theoretical physicist, shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Igor Yevgenevich Tamm.
Frank and Tamm explained the effects of a discovery that Cherenkov made in 1934. Cherenkov showed that a transparent substance gives off light when electrons or other charged particles move through it faster than light. This phenomenon became known as the Cherenkov effect. Frank, Tamm, and Cherenkov were the first Russians to receive the Nobel Prize for physics.
Ilya Mikhailovich Frank was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a mathematician and his mother was a physician. He studied at the Moscow State University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1930. He received his doctorate in 1935. From 1931 to 1934 he worked for the State Optical Institute (now the Vavilov State Optical Institute). In 1934, he joined the P. N. Lebedev Institute of Physics, part of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences (now the Russian Academy of Sciences), in Moscow. He remained at the Lebedev Institute until 1979.
Frank worked concurrently as a professor of physics at Moscow University from 1944 to 1990. During World War II (1939-1945), he contributed to the Soviet effort to develop an atomic bomb. In 1957, he became the head of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics at the newly established Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna, near Moscow.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Frank received many awards from the Soviet Union. These included the Lenin Prize, three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Order of the October Revolution, and the Vavilov Gold Medal from the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was made a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1946 and a full member in 1968.
In 1937, Frank married Ella Abramovna Beilikhis, a historian. The couple had one child, a son who became a physicist.