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Nándor Balázs

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Hungarian-American physicist (1926–2003)
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The native form of this personal name is Balázs Nándor. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
Nándor Balázs
Photo of Nándor Balázs shown looking up to his right, from the 1966 Stony Brook University YearbookNándor Balázs, circa 1966
BornNándor László Balázs
(1926-07-07)July 7, 1926
Budapest, Hungary
DiedAugust 16, 2003(2003-08-16) (aged 77)
Setauket, New York, U.S.
NationalityHungarian, American
Alma materUniversity of Budapest
University of Amsterdam
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
InstitutionsEnrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago
Princeton University
Stony Brook University

Nándor Balázs (Hungarian: Balázs Nándor László; July 7, 1926 – August 16, 2003) was a Hungarian-American physicist, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (from 1995).

Early life and education

Balázs attended to the Rácz private primary school and was a classmate of Janos Kemeny. Nándor Balázs received a master's degree at the University of Budapest (1948). Balázs left communist Hungary in 1949. He received a PhD at the University of Amsterdam (1951).

Scientific career

After receiving his PhD, Balázs spent two years (1951 and 1952) as assistant to Schroedinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, one year (autumn 1952 through summer 1953) as assistant to Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Alabama during the years 1953–56. From 1956 to 1959, he was Research Associate at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and then became a Research Staff Member at the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University from 1959 to 1961. In 1961 he went to the Stony Brook University. During his life, Balázs had close friendships and working collaborations with Schroedinger, Paul Dirac (Dirac's wife, Margit Wigner, was Hungarian), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Eugene Wigner, and other major figures in 20th-century physics.

Balázs maintained contacts in his native Hungary and occasionally brought Hungarian physicists to the US. In his collaborations with people in Budapest (notably Béla Lukács and József Zimányi), he dealt with relativistic heavy-ion collisions and thus provided a connection between Stony Brook (a home of RHIC theory) and Hungary.

Papers: Effect of a gravitational field, due to a rotating body, on the plane of polarization of an electromagnetic wave. Phys. Rev. 110, 236–239 (1958)

EINSTEIN: Theory of Relativity. Gillispie (ed.) Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. IV, 319-332 (1971)

References

  1. de Zafra; Bergeman; Berry, Balian; Voros (2008). "Nándor Balázs" (PDF). Saclay, Paris: Institut de physique théorique. Retrieved April 10, 2011.
  2. de Zafra, Robert; Bergeman, Tom; Berry, Michael; Balian, Roger; Voros, André (May 2004). "Obituary: Nándor Balázs". Physics Today. 57 (5): 74. Bibcode:2004PhT....57e..74D. doi:10.1063/1.1768679.
  3. Bognár, Desi K. (ed.), Hungarians in America: A Biographical Directory of Professionals of Hungarian Origin in the Americas. Philadelphia: Afi Publication, 1971, 12.
  4. Staff (2000). "Balázs, Nándor". State University of New York, Sunnybrook. Archived from the original on July 20, 2011. Retrieved April 10, 2011.
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