Yuri Borisovich Rumer (, 28 April 1901 – 1 February 1985) was a Soviet theoretical physicist, who mostly worked in the fields of quantum mechanics and quantum optics. Known in the West as Georg Rumer, he was a close friend of Lev Landau, and was arrested with him during the Great Purge in 1938. Biography Rumer was born in Moscow into a Jewish merchant family. His elder brothers Osip and Isidor were well-known translators and philosophers. After graduating from non-classical secondary school in 1917, in 1918 Rumer entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University and graduated in 1924. In 1927 he married Lyudmila Zalkind, his girlfriend of nine years, and emigrated with her to Oldenburg, Germany, where he enrolled to study construction engineering. The same year he abandoned this boring for him topic in favor of theoretical physics, and moved to Göttingen. During an internship at the University of Göttingen he worked as an assistant of Max Born. He collaborated with Walter Heitler and published several theoretical works on the structure of molecules. Rumer returned to Moscow in May 1932, as persecution of Jews in Germany became a real threat to him and his wife. He became an associate professor at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University (MSU) and assumed a professor position in January 1933. He was recommended for this position by Erwin Schrödinger and Leonid Mandelstam. At MSU Rumer supervised several notable scientists, including Mikhail Volkenshtein. He lectured at MSU from 1932 to 1937 and worked as a scientist at the Lebedev Physical Institute from 1935 to 1938. In 1935 he defended his habilitation, and in 1937 started working with Lev Landau; very soon they became close friends. Rumer was arrested on the Arbat Street in April 1938 as an accomplice of the "public enemy", Landau, when he was going to a birthday party. One of his brothers was jailed earlier on an unrelated case as part of Stalin's purges. Landau was arrested too, but released after one year owing to the extraordinary efforts of Pyotr Kapitsa. While in jail Rumer first worked on plane flutter and wobble problems in a sharashka situated at an Omsk suburb. Later in 1946 he was transferred to Taganrog. There he worked on a project of a new transport aircraft, which was headed by Robert Bartini. After serving full 10 years of his sentence, Rumer was exiled