Ilya Mikhailovich Frank (; 23 October 1908 – 22 June 1990) was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Igor Y. Tamm, also of the Soviet Union. He received the award for his work in explaining the phenomenon of Cherenkov radiation. He received the Stalin prize in 1946 and 1953 and the USSR state prize in 1971.
Life and career
Ilya Frank was born on 23 October 1908 in St. Petersburg. His father, Mikhail Lyudvigovich Frank, was a talented mathematician descended from a Jewish family, while his mother, Yelizaveta Mikhailovna Gratsianova, was a Russian Orthodox physician. His father participated in the student revolutionary movement, and as a result was expelled from Moscow University. After the October Revolution, he was reinstated and appointed professor. Ilya's uncle, Semyon Frank, a philosopher, was expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 together with 160 other intellectuals. Ilya had one elder brother, Gleb Mikhailovich Frank, who became an eminent biophysicist and member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
Ilya Frank studied mathematics and theoretical physics at Moscow State University. From his second year he worked in the laboratory of Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov, whom he regarded as his mentor. After graduating in 1930, on recommendation of Vavilov, he started working at the State Optical Institute in Leningrad. There he wrote his first publication—about luminescence— with Vavilov. The work he did there would form the basis of his doctoral dissertation in 1935.