Renowned Pakistani scientist and the country’s first Nobel prize winner Dr Abdus Salam was remembered on his death anniversary on Monday.
Dr Abdus Salam was born in Jhang in 1926. In 1950, he received the Smith’s Prize from Cambridge University for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to physics. He also obtained a PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge; his thesis, published in 1951, contained fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics. Salam returned to Pakistan in 1951 to teach mathematics at Government College, Lahore. He became head of the Mathematics Department of the Punjab University in 1952. He worked abroad to pursue a career of research in theoretical physics. At the ICTP, Trieste, which he created, he instituted the famous “Associateships”.
In 1954, Salam left Pakistan for a lectureship at Cambridge, and since then has visited Pakistan as adviser on science policy. He was a member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, a member of the Scientific Commission of Pakistan and was the chief scientific adviser to the president from 1961 to 1974. Since 1957, he was a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College, London, and in 1964, combined this position with that of the director of the ICTP, Trieste. For more than forty years, he remained a prolific researcher in theoretical elementary particle physics.
He served on a number of United Nations committees concerned with the advancement of science and technology in developing countries. The money he received from the Atoms for Peace Medal and Award was spent on setting up a fund for young Pakistani physicists to visit the ICTP. He used his share of the Nobel Prize entirely for the benefit of physicists from developing countries. Salam died on November 21, 1996 at the age of 70 in Oxford, England after a long illness.
Nobel laureate Salam’s death anniversary observed
