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News from ICTP 89 - Monitor
Zhang Yishan, Resident Representative of China to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), visited the ICTP in early May. Zhang met ICTP director, Miguel Virasoro, toured the library and computer facilities, and spoke to Faheem Hussain, Head of the Office of External Activities, and Yu Lu, Head of the Condensed Matter Physics Group. Ambassador Zhang also held an informal meeting with about 15 visiting scientists and students from China currently studying and pursuing their research at ICTP and the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA).
Stephen L. Adler of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey (USA), who shared the 1998 ICTP Dirac Medal with Roman Jackiw of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), delivered his Dirac Lecture, "What Chiral Symmetry Teaches Us About Particle Properties," on 10 June. Anamaria Font from Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, and Fernando Quevedo of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico were awarded the 1998 Prize in the field of High Energy Physics (in honour of Nobel Laureate Chen Ning Yang) on 24 June.
Vinod Kumar Sharma, a Fellow with ICTP Programme for Training and Research in Italian Laboratories (TRIL), now on assignment with the Italian Commission for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) at a research centre in Trisaia, in southern Italy, was awarded two gold medals for a pair of research papers he presented at the 7th International Energy Conference (ENERGEX '98).
Wale Omole, Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, visited the ICTP in late May to sign a three-year extension of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Centre that will facilitate the extension of the OAU communications network. The initial MOU was signed in 1995. Under the terms of the agreement, ICTP Programme of Training and System Development on Networking and Radiocommunications will continue to help the University make use of its network to enhance research activities in physics and the physical sciences; promote an exchange of information between the Centre and the University; and facilitate co-operative activities between OAU and the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, in the fields of optical physics, radiocommunications and space science. The latter activities will take place under the sponsorship of the ICTP Office of External Activities (OEA).
Efim Samoilovich Fradkin, 75, a professor at the Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow, Russia, and winner of the ICTP Dirac Medal in 1988, died on 25 May. Fradkin's university studies began at the University of Minsk in 1940. A member of the Russian Army during World War II, he was wounded during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. After the war, Fradkin continued his studies at the University of Lvov, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1948. The same year, he began his post-graduate studies at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he was awarded a doctorate degree in physics. For more than 50 years, Fradkin worked as a scientist at the institute, earning an international reputation in the study of quantum field theory and quantum statistics. In addition to the ICTP Dirac Medal, Fradkin won the Soviet State Prize in 1953 and the Academy Tamm Prize in 1980.
Pakistani-born Munir Ahmad Khan, 73, a close associate
of ICTP's founding director Abdus Salam, died on 22 April in Vienna,
Austria. Khan, a nuclear engineer by training, joined the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1958. From 1986 to 1987, he was
Chairman of the IAEA's Board of Governors. He also served as Scientific
Secretary of the UN Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of
Atomic Energy from 1964 to 1971, and Chairman of the Pakistan
Atomic Energy Commission from 1972 to 1991. Khan last visited
the ICTP during the Abdus Salam Memorial Meeting, held on 19-22
November 1997. He was the first person at the IAEA to whom Salam
went to broach the idea of an international centre for theoretical
physics. Their conversation took place in September 1960 in Vienna.
