Nikolai Basov is one of the inventors of the laser and its technical predecessor, the maser. Lasers have become one of the most widely used of all twentieth-century inventions. They find diverse applications from delicate surgery to the cutting of steel, astronomical research, and popular entertainment. Working with theoretical concepts first developed by Albert Einstein four decades earlier, Basov found ways of amplifying a beam of incoming electromagnetic radiation until it becomes a discrete, intense, monochromatic and amplified version of itself, a source of high-intensity radiation. For this discovery, Basov shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for physics with his teacher Aleksandr Prokhorov and Charles Townes, an American who made the same discovery independently.

Nikolai Gennadiyevich Basov was born on December 14, 1922, in the small village of Usman, outside the city of Voronezh, Russia. His mother was the former Zinaida Andreyevna Molchanova, and his father, Gennady Fedorovich Basov, was a professor...