Nicholas Kurti

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Professor Nicholas Kurti (Hungarian: Kürti Miklós) FRS (May 14, 1908 - November 24, 1998) was an Hungarian-born physicist who lived in Oxford, UK, for most of his life.

Born in Budapest, he went to high school at the Minta Gymnasium, but due to anti-Jewish laws he had to leave the country, gaining his master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris. He obtained his doctorate in low-temperature physics in Berlin, working with Professor Franz Simon. However, when Adolf Hitler rose to power, both Simon and Kurti left Germany, joining the Clarendon Laboratory in the University of Oxford, England.

During World War II he worked on the Atomic bomb project, returning to Oxford in 1945. In 1956, Simon and Kurti built a laboratory experiment that reached a temperature of one microkelvin. This work attracted worldwide attention, and Kurti was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He later became the society's Vice-President from 1965 to 1967.

He became Professor of Physics at Oxford in 1967, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. He was also Visiting Professor at City College in New York, the University of California, Berkeley, and Amherst College in Massachusetts.

His hobby was cooking, and among his achievements were a reversed baked Alaska (frozen on the outside and hot inside), and organising several international workshops in Erice, Italy on "Molecular and Physical Gastronomy" (see molecular gastronomy).