Nobel Prize Recipient. Igor Tamm received worldwide recognition after being awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared jointly this award with Pavel Cherenkov and Ilya M. Frank. These three Russian physicists received the award, according to the Nobel Prize Committee, "for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect." He received three nominations for the Nobel candidacy. In 1934 Cherenkov had discovered that bluish light is emitted when gamma rays pass through water. In 1937 Tamm and Frank explained this phenomenon as the emission of light waves by electrically charged particles moving faster than the speed of light in a medium. Tamm developed this theory more fully in a paper published in 1939. This became known in the scientific community as the Cherenkov Effect, yet in countries that were behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, the "Cherenkov Effect" is referred to as the Vavilov-Cherenkov Effect or Cherenkov Radiation. While still a doctorate student under S.I. Vavilov, . Cherenkov made his discovery. Since Vavilov died in 1951, seven years before the 1958 Nobel Prize, he was not a candidate for the coveted award. Besides the Nobel Prize, he along with Cherenkov, Tamm, and Vavilov were awarded State Prizes in 1946 for the Cherenkov Effect. Born in the what was the Russian Empire, there is conflicting documentation on his origin: One of the sources states his ancestry was of German nobility with his grandfather coming to Russia, another was he was Jewish, and yet another his family was from Estonia. His early education was in what is now Ukraine. Between 1913 to 1914, he studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His close classmate in Scotland was physicist Boris Hessen, who was executed during Joseph Stalin's regime in 1936 for terrorism against the Soviet government. At the dawn of World War I, he enlisted in the Russian Army in 1914 as a field medic. With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he became an active anti-war campaigner, serving on committees after the March Revolution. He returned to his college studies in 1918 at the Moscow State University, where he graduated. In 1923 he began teaching physics at the Second Moscow State University. From 1934 until his death, he was the head of the theoretical department at Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. He published numerous scientific papers including "Electrodynamics of the Anisotropic Medium in the Special Theory of Relativity" in 1923 and "Surface States" in 1932. During World War II, he was not involved with the research on the atomic bomb as he was labeled by Joseph Stalin's regime as a "bourgeois idealist" and his brother an "enemy of the state." After the war in 1948, he was recruited to be part of a team of a dozen scientists to investigate the feasibility of creating a design for a thermonuclear bomb. One bomb design, known as Layer Cake, was successfully tested on Aug. 12, 1953. At that point, he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences in October of 1953 and returned to teaching full-time. In the last years of his career, he held a post at Lebedev Institute, where he developed a fusion reactor to control the fusion, using a powerful magnetic field in a donut-shaped device known as a Tokamak Reactor. His colleague in developing the Tokomak Rector was physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, who received the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize after being in opposition to the use of nuclear energy, especially as a weapon of war. In 1964 he was elected to the German National Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the Order of the Hero of Soviet Labor Award in 1953, the Stalin Prize in 1954, and the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 1967. He along with Cherenkov, Frank, and Vavilov, were awarded State Prizes in 1946 for the Cherenkov Effect. Although the Soviet Union was isolated from the west, he had several professional colleagues from western Europe. He married in 1917 and the couple had a daughter and a son. His son Evgeny became an experimental physicist, who received recognition as a famous mountain climber being the leader of the Soviet Everest Expedition in 1982. A moon crater was named in his honor. In 2000 the Russian postage service issued Tamm's image on the stamp called "Idea of phonons, 1929."