In genius studies, Landau genius scale (LGS), Landau’s ranking (LR), or “Landau physicist genius scale”, is a personal ranking of physics geniuses, e.g. greatest physicists ever (of the 20th century predominately), maintained by Russian physicist Lev Landau (1908-1968), assembled in circa 1930s, and modified over the years, which he supposedly kept in his coat pocket; amid which he ranked himself, considering thinkers below him to be "fools", and those above him to be "superior intellects", and those comparable to him, e.g. Wolfgang Pauli, supposedly, to make him angry if they were skeptical of his views and or theories.
_ Landau genius scale 0 Isaac Newton 0.5 Albert Einstein 1 Paul Dirac
Erwin Schrodinger
Richard Feynman [11]
Niels Bohr
Werner Heisenberg
Louis de Broglie [11]
Satyendra Bose
Eugene Wigner, and a few others1.5 Lev Landau (in later years) [8] Hans Bethe (2016) [12] 2 Lev Landau (after 1962 Nobel Prize)
Juan Maldacena (2008) [9]2.5 Lev Landau (before 1962 Nobel Prize) 3 Edward Witten (2008) [9] 3.5 4 4.5 David Mermin (own estimate ±) 5 Mundane or "pathologists"
1.0 Lev Landau [vote | 2008] [9]
2.5 Edward Witten [vote | 2016] [12]
3.5 David Mermin [vote | 2016] [12]
“Landau who treated everyone else as a fool found his match in Pauli. After explaining his work to a skeptical Pauli, he angrily asked whether Pauli thought that his ideas were nonsense. ‘Not at all, not at all,’ came the reply. ‘Your ideas are so confused I cannot tell whether they are nonsense or not’.”
See main: Landau genius scaleIn the years circa 1930 to 1960, Russian physicist Lev Landau (1908-1968) developed a personal physicist ranking system, which he kept on him, using a logarithmic 0 to 5 point scale (Lifsĥitz, 1974) (Pitaevskii, 2010) to rank, in his calculated opinion, the great physicists. (Ѻ)
“Landau’s classification of outstanding genius physicist, as narrated by his close associate Evgen Lifsĥitz, at a talk given in 1974 at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. According to Landau’s classification, Isaac Newton received the highest rank, 0, followed by Albert Einstein at a rank of 0.5, then by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Satyendra Bose, Eugene Wigner, and a few others at 1, and so on. Landau had given himself a modest rank of 2.5. The classification continued to the rank of 5 for mundane physicists.”
“Landau was always walking around with a ranking of the best physicists in history recorded in his notebook. He scored them on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 5. Newton was rated the best. Einstein was next and, of course, Bohr. After them came Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrödinger, Bose and Wigner.”
 Livanova (1980) ↓ | → |  Simon (2013) |
 Mermin (1988) | ||
“Landau’s classification of physicists on a scale of 1 to 5, Einstein rating ½, Bohr and the other founding fathers 1, Landau himself 2½ (but promoted later in life to 2), and the 5s ‘pathologists’.”
“Let me first modify my title [“My Life with Landau”]. There is a short biography of Landau by Anna Livanova. There she describes his classification of physicists on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 5. Einstein has a special rank, ½, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and a few others were 1s. Landau, originally a 2½, later promoted himself to a 2. Members of class 5 were called ‘pathologists’. When I reviewed this book for Physics Today the editor asked for a short biographical blurb. Just say, I replied, that I’ve worked in fields of interest to Landau in hope of getting out of class 5. So, in Jun 1981 Physics Today, you can read at the bottom of page 61, “N.D. Mermin is a professor of physics at Cornell University. Struggling to qualify as a 4½, he has made occasional contributions to the theory of phase transitions and liquid helium.”
“Landau used to keep a list of names, in which he graded physicists into ‘leagues’. The first division contained the names of physicists such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger, the founding fathers of quantum physics, as well as historical ‘giants’ such as Isaac Newton. He was rather modest about his own classification, grading himself 2½, although he later promoted himself to a 2. Landau [also] created a ‘superleague’ containing only one physicist, Einstein, whom he uniquely classified as a ½.”
“Of all the physicists I have known personally, nobody resembled Landau more than Feynman. This resemblance extends to many things, scientific style, aspects of their personality and behavior, and interest in pedagogical ideas.”— Vitaly Ginzburg (1993), “A Unique Physicist and Teacher of Physicists” [11]
“Lev Landau was a genius and I propose to upgrade him from 2 to 1.5 if not 1 on the Landau scale.”— Lubos Motl (2008), “Lev Landau was Born 100 Years Ago” [9]
