Vitaly Ginzburg

Vitaly Ginzburg was a Russian physicist who lived from 1916 to 2009, best known for developing the Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity with Lev Landau and for contributions to understanding electromagnetic wave propagation in plasmas and the origins of cosmic radiation. He spent his career at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute in the Soviet Union, participated in the Soviet hydrogen bomb program from 1948 to 1952, and later headed the Lebedev Institute own Department of Theoretical Physics, succeeding Igor Tamm. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, shared with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett, for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids, and was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1987. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1994.