Professor Pyotr Kapitsa, c mid-20th century

Pyotr Leondiovich Kapitsa, or Peter Kapitza, was born 9 July 1894, and died 8 April 1984, was a Soviet physicist. Kapitsa initial studies were disrupted by WWI, during which he worked as an ambulance driver in Poland. He graduated from Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918. The same year, his wife and children died from Spanish influenza. Kapitsa thus moved to the UK and worked with Ernest Rutherford at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, and founded the Kapitza club. Kapitsa remarried to Anna Alekseyevna Krylova and had two sons. After returning to visit his parents in 1934, he was not permitted to return to the UK. In 1937, as part of his experiments on liquid helium, Kapitsa discovered superfluidity. He was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1978) for this work. During WWII, he headed the Department of Oxygen Industry. He famously fought with Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD and the Soviet atomic bomb project, accusing him of ignorance of physics, with Stalin taking Kapitsa's side. After the war, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology was formed, where Kapitsa taught for many years. Kapitsa was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the only one not also a member of the Communist Party. In 1966, he returned to Cambridge to be awarded the Rutherford Prize. Kapitsa died in 1984, aged 89.