Sergio Fubini

Sergio Fubini (December 31, 1928 – January 6, 2005) was an Italian theoretical physicist. He was one of the pioneers of string theory. Politically he engaged himself actively for peace in the Middle East.

Biography

Fubini was born in Turin. In 1938, he fled the country as a politically persecuted Jew to Switzerland. In 1945, he attended the Lycée in Turin, where he studied physics and in 1950 graduated "cum laude." Afterwards, he was an assistant in Turin. From 1954 to 1957, he was in the USA. From 1958 to 1967, he was at CERN in Geneva. In 1959, he became a professor for nuclear physics at University of Padua. In 1961, he became a professor for theoretical physics at University of Turin. From 1968 to 1973, he was at MIT, but taught summer courses in Turin. He went back to CERN in 1973 and was from 1971 to 1980 a member of the advisory board and had an important role in planning the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP) as well as in discussions for the construction of the Middle East's Synchrotron, SESAME.[1][2]

At MIT, he was with Gabriele Veneziano, Emilio Del Giudice and Paolo Di Vecchia at the center of an active school of theoretical physicist with close connections to Italy (with one of the Italian INFN and MIT financed "Bruno Rossi" exchange programs). He and his co-workers did fundamental work in string theory.[3] Other well-known MIT colleagues at that time were Victor Weisskopf (who was recruited by Fubini to MIT), Steven Weinberg and Roman Jackiw. From 1994 to 2001, he was a professor in Turin. Fubini worked in the 1960s on current algebras and S-matrix theory (Regge trajectories among other things), in particular on their field-theoretical foundations. In the 1970s, he was with his MIT colleagues and his pupils Gabriele Veneziano, Emilio Del Giudice and Paolo Di Vecchia one of the pioneers of string theory.[4] He worked in the 1970s on other classical solutions of Yang–Mills equations and conformally invariant quantum field theory.[5]

Fubini died in 2005 in Geneva.[6][7] He married Marina Colombo in 1956 and had a daughter with her.

Honors

Fubini received the Dannie Heineman Prize in 1968 for mathematical physics and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg.

References

  1. ↑ Schopper, Herwig (March 2000). "SESAME: a mini-CERN for the Middle East". CERN Courier 40 (2): 17–18.
  2. ↑ Llewellyn Smith, Chris (September 2014). "Viewpoint: A shining light in the Middle East" (PDF). CERN Courier 54 (7): 46.
  3. ↑ The Birth of String Theory
  4. ↑ Emilio Del Giudice; Sergio Fubini; Sergio Fubini (1972). "General properties of the dual resonances model". Annals of Physics 70 (2): 378–398. Bibcode:1972AnPhy..70..378D. doi:10.1016/0003-4916(72)90272-2.
  5. ↑ Fubini, S.; Hanson, A. J.; Jackiw, R. (1973). "New Approaches to Field Theory". Phys. Rev. D 7 (6): 1732–1760. Bibcode:1973PhRvD...7.1732F. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.7.1732.
  6. ↑ "People: Sergio Fubini 1928-2005". CERN Courier 45 (2): 39. March 2005.
  7. ↑ Khan, Sameen Ahmed (May 2005). "People: Sergio Fubini, MESC and SESAME". CERN Courier 45 (4): 44.

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