Frank, Ilya Mikhailovich, 1908–90, Soviet physicist, Ph.D. Moscow State Univ., 1935. He was a professor at Moscow State Univ. from 1944 until his death in 1990. Mikhailovich and Igor Y. Tamm won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pavel A. Cherenkov and Igor Tamm for their explanation of the radiation discovered by Cherenkov (see Cherenkov radiation). In 1937, Frank and Tamm discovered that the light waves emitted when gamma rays pass through a liquid medium are produced by electrically charged particles moving faster than the speed of light in the medium.
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