The Kharkiv Theoretical Physics School was foundered by Lev Landau in Kharkov, Soviet Union (now Kharkiv, Ukraine). It is sometimes referred to as the Landau school. Landau was the head of the Theoretical Division at the Institute for Physical Problems from 1937 until 1962 when, as a result of a car accident, he suffered injuries from which he was never back to science.[1]His students included Lev Pitaevskii, Alexei Abrikosov, Arkady Levanyuk, Evgeny Lifshitz, Lev Gor'kov, Isaak Khalatnikov, Boris L. Ioffe and Isaak Pomeranchuk.
Landau developed a comprehensive exam called the "Theoretical Minimum" which students were expected to pass before admission to the school. The exam covered all aspects of theoretical physics, and between 1943 and 1961 only 43 candidates passed. In this way his students became proper physicists, rather than narrow specialists.
In Kharkiv, he and his friend and former student, Evgeny Lifshitz, began writing the Course of Theoretical Physics, ten volumes that together span the whole of the subject and are still widely used as graduate-level physics texts.