Marcos Moshinsky

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Marcos Moshinsky (born April 20, 1921) is a Mexican physicist of Ukrainian origin whose work in the field of elementary particles won him the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Investigation in 1988.

He was born in 1921 into a Jewish family in Kiev, Ukraine (which was then part of the Soviet Union). At the age of three, he emigrated as a refugee to Mexico.He became a Mexican citizen in 1942. He obtained his licenciatura degree in physics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (the Mexican "licenciatura" is a degree between the US BSc and MSc) and studied for his doctorate at Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey, United States) under Nobel Laureate Eugene Paul Wigner.

In the 1950s he researched nuclear reactions and the structure of the atomic nucleus, introducing the concept of the transformation parenthesis for functions of harmonic oscillation, which, together with the tables elaborated in collaboration with T.A. Brody, simplified calculations in the nucleus layer models and became an indispensable reference for the study of nuclear structures.

After completing postdoctoral studies at the Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris, France, he returned to Mexico City to serve as a professor at the Autonomous University. In 1967 he was chosen president of the Mexican Society of Physics and in 1972 he was admitted to the Colegio Nacional. He is editor of several international scientific reviews and author of more than 200 technical papers and four books. In 1968 he received the Mexican National Prize for Science, in 1971 the Luis Elizondo Prize, in 1985 UNAM Prize for Exact Sciences (which he donated to the victims of that September's earthquake in Mexico), and in 1988 the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Investigation.

While practising physics, he wrote a weekly column in the newspaper El Excelsior where he kept a conservative position on Mexican politics.

Prof. Moshinsky is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [1].

[edit] Reference

This article began as a translation of the corresponding article in the Spanish-language Wikipedia.

[edit] External links

• Profile at the Prince of Asturias Foundation.
• (Spanish) Profile at the Colegio Nacional of Mexico.