Paolo Budinich
| Paolo Budinich | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born |
28 August 1916 Lussingrande |
| Died |
14 November 2013 Trieste |
| Nationality | Italian |
Paolo Budinich (1916–2013) was a theoretical physicist. Born from a sailors' descent from Losinj, grew up and studied in Trieste, where the family resided, because the father Antonio Budini[1] taught in the local High School, the same where Paolo Budinich got his grade in 1934. He later started his study course at Università degli Studi di Pisa graduating at the Scuola Normale Superiore in 1938.[2]
In the same year he started to teach physics on the Italian training ship Amerigo Vespucci, belonging to Italian Naval Academy of Leghorn.
During Second World War he served as Leutnant on the Navy submarines and observator on the Navy planes; in 1941 Budinich was caught prisoner by the Royal Navy and became a prisoner of war, thus being transferred to England and in the United States.
Back to Physics, in 1952 he worked with Werner Heisenberg in Göttingen and in 1954 with Wolfgang Pauli in Zürich.
He was one of the first promoters of Trieste as a science resort at international level. In 1964 he founded in Trieste, together with Abdus Salam, the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). In the same year he promoted the Advanced School of Physics, that in 1978 was upgraded to the School for Higher Studies SISSA, which was the first Italian higher education institution providing PhD (besides Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa) and became its first director.
In his autobiography L'arcipelago delle meraviglie, published in 2000, Budinich pleads for a reunification between science and philosophy and suggests a superior capability of mathematics to disclose unknown scientific discovery paths. His main work, The Spinorial Chessboard, written together with the polish mathematical physicist Andrzej Trautman, refers to Elie Cartan's conceptual foundation of spinor geometry and explores its applications to modern physics.
Note
- ↑ In 1937, during Fascism, the family name was italianised in “Budini”; it was restored to the original spelling in 1977.
- ↑ from ictp.trieste.it
Bibliography
- Pietro Greco e Federica Manzoli, Buongiorno Prof. Budinich. La storia eccezionale di un fisico italiano, Bompiani, 2007, ISBN 9788845258206;
- Paolo Budinich, L'arcipelago delle meraviglie, Di Renzo Editore, Roma 2000, ISBN 978-88-8323-006-6;
- Paolo Budinich and Andrzej Trautman, The Spinorial Chessboard, Springer Verlag, Berlin-New York 1988, ISBN 9783540190783.
- Rita Cian, Paolo Budinich. Sea, science and adventure in the life of a Theoretical Physicist, Maqom Hazè, Trieste 2014, ISBN 9788898946020.