Landau, Lev Davidovich (1908-1968), a Russian physicist, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1962. He started his award-winning work in 1941, developing new theories of liquid gases, especially liquid helium. Landau discovered that helium below -455.8 °F (-271.0 °C) moves as a system of waves, not as single particles. His work helped explain some strange properties of liquid helium, such as its ability to creep around barriers and up slopes. Landau was born in Baku, Russia.