You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (September 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:Тамм, Игорь Евгеньевич]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|Тамм, Игорь Евгеньевич}} to the talk page.
Tamm on the 2000 Russian stamp "Idea of phonons, 1929"
Igor Tamm was born in 1895 in Vladivostok into the family of Eugene Tamm, a civil engineer, and his wife Olga Davydova. According to Russian sources, Tamm had German noble descent on his father's side through his grandfather Theodor Tamm, who emigrated from Thuringia.[1][2] Although his surname "Tamm" is rather common in Estonia, other sources state he was Jewish or had Jewish ancestry.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he joined the army as a volunteer field medic. In 1917 he joined the Revolutionary movement and became an active anti-war campaigner, serving on revolutionary committees after the March Revolution.[12] He returned to the Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1918.
Tamm married Nataliya Shuyskaya (1894–1980) in September 1917. Shе belonged to a noble Rurikid Shuysky family. They eventually had two children, Irina (1921–2009, chemist) and Evgeny (1926–2008, experimental physicist and famous mountain climber, leader of the Soviet Everest expedition in 1982[13]).
On 1 May 1923, Tamm began teaching physics at the Second Moscow State University. The same year, he finished his first scientific paper, Electrodynamics of the Anisotropic Medium in the Special Theory of Relativity.[14] In 1928, he spent a few months with Paul Ehrenfest at the University of Leiden and made a life-long friendship with Paul Dirac.[15][16] From 1934 until his death in 1971 Tamm was the head of the theoretical department at Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow.
In 1932, Tamm published a paper with his proposal of the concept of surface states. This concept is important for metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) physics.
In 1934, Tamm and Semen Altshuller suggested that the neutron has a non-zero magnetic moment,[17][18] the idea was met with scepticism at that time, as the neutron was supposed to be an elementary particle with zero charge, and thus could not have a magnetic moment. The same year, Tamm coined an idea that proton-neutron interactions can be described as an exchange force transmitted by a yet unknown massive particle,[19][20] this idea was later developed by Hideki Yukawa into a theory of meson forces.
In 1945 he developed an approximation method for many-body physics. As Sidney Dancoff developed it independently in 1950, it is now called the Tamm-Dancoff approximation.
In late 1940s to early 1950s Tamm was involved in the Soviet thermonuclear bomb project; in 1949–1953 he spent most of his time in the "secret city" of Sarov, working as a head of the theoretical group developing the hydrogen bomb,[21] however he retired from the project and returned to the Moscow Lebedev Physical Institute after the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb in 1953.
In 1951, together with Andrei Sakharov, Tamm proposed a tokamak system for the realization of controlled thermonuclear fusion on the basis of toroidal magnetic thermonuclear reactor and soon after the first such devices were built by the INF. Results from the T-3 Soviet magnetic confinement device in 1968, when the plasma parameters unique for that time were obtained, showed temperatures in their machine to be over an order of magnitude higher than what was expected by the rest of the community. The western scientists visited the experiment and verified the high temperatures and confinement, sparking a wave of optimism for the prospects of the tokamak as well as construction of new experiments, which is still the dominant magnetic confinement device today.
^Comay, Joan; Cohn-Sherbok, Lavinia (2002). Who's who in Jewish history: after the period of the Old Testament. Routledge. p. 362. ISBN978-0-415-26030-5.
^Schlessinger, Bernard S.; Schlessinger, June H. (1996). The who's who of Nobel Prize winners, 1901–1995. Oryx Press. p. 201. ISBN978-0-89774-899-5. Parents: Father, Evgen Tamm; Mother, Olga Davidova Tamm. Nationality: Russian. Religion: Jewish.
^Efron, Noah (2014). A Chosen Calling: Jews in Science in the Twentieth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN9781421413822. ...Ilya Frank, Igor Tamm, and Lev Landau... Frank, Tamm and Landau – were, like Ioffe himself, born to Jewish parents...
^Ginzburg, V. L. (2005). About Science, Myself and Others. CRC Press. p. 253. ISBN9780750309929. Nowadays, when we are facing manifestations of religious and. more often, pseudoreligious feelings, it is appropriate to mention that Igor Evgenevich was a convinced and unreserved atheist.
^Feinberg, E. L.; Leonidov, A. V. (2011). Physicists: Epoch and Personalities (2 ed.). World Scientific. p. 86. ISBN978-9812834164.
Igor Tamm on Nobelprize.org including his Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1958 General Characteristics of Radiation Emitted by Systems Moving with Super-Light Velocities with Some Applications to Plasma Physics
