MATSCIENCE EARLY YEARS, 1962-66Anniversary Symposia and VisitorsRight from the start, there was a steady stream of eminent visiting scientists to MATSCIENCE, even though the accommodations of the Institute were very modest. Indeed, the first few years had perhaps the greatest concentration of world renowned visitors. After the inauguration of MATSCIENCE, the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyam Chandrasekar, Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, gave the first seminar of the new Institute on gravitation in physics. Two distinguished visiting professorships were created - The Niels Bohr Professorship (after Bohr passed away in 1963) in physics, and the Ramanujan Professorship in mathematics. The eminent mathematician Marshall Stone, Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, was the First Ramanujan Visiting Professor in 1963. Likewise, Professor Robert Marshak (University of Rochester) was the First Niels Bohr Visiting Professor in 1963. Professor Leon Rosenfeld, a colleague and collaborator of Bohr at the Copenhagen Institute, was the Niels Bohr Visiting Professor in 1964. When Rosenfeld arrived he said that at every conference he attended in the past year in Europe, some physicist or the other said that he/she had either visited the MATSCIENCE or was planning a visit. Professor Rosenfeld was surprised that the new Institute managed such an outstanding visiting program with such modest accommodation at the Presidency College in Madras. Later in 1964, MATSCIENCE moved to the Central Polytechnic Campus to gain access to an upper floor of a large building, but even then space was not adequate. It was only in 1969 that MATSCIENCE moved to its permanent new building. The steady flow of visitors had a tremendous effect on the research output of the faculty and the PhD students because the seminars by the visitors exposed them to the latest research developments. It also drew the attention of the visitors to work being done at the Institute and led to collaborative research. Even though there were visitors throughout the year, the greatest concentration was in January each year in connection with the Anniversary Symposia held around January 3, the date of the MATSCIENCE inauguration. It was also an occasion to release the Anniversary Reports. I provide here a list of some of the visitors in the early years (the list is not complete): 1962 - T. H. R. Skyrme (Atomic Research Establishment, England), Ugo Fano (National Bureau of Standards, USA), Caude Bloch (SACLAY, France), D. G. Bourgin (Urbana, Illinois), W. Thirring (Vienna), Bogdan Maglic (CERN, Geneva), Einar Hille, Richard Guy (Univ. Calgary) and Emilio Segre (Nobel Laureate, Berkeley). 1963 - Robert Marshak (Rochester), Leonard Schiff (Stanford), Charles Zemach (Berkeley), G. Takeda (Tokyo), Maurice Shapiro (Naval Research Labs, USA), Marshall Stone (Chicago), Shreeram Abhyankar (Purdue), Paul Roman (Boston Univ.), R. Hagedorn (CERN, Geneva), N. Fukuda (Japan), Peter Duerr (Germany), H. Umezawa (Italy), S. Kamefuchi (Tokyo), and George Sudarshan (Syracuse). 1964 - Leon Rosenfeld (Copenhagen), A. T. Barucha Reid (Wayne State Univ.), McCrea Hazlett (Rochester), Bruno Zumino, Hugh DeWitt, L. O'Rafertaigh (Dublin), Maurice Jacob (Saclay, France), Henri Stapp (Berkeley), E. R. Caianiello (Naples), J. Lukierski (Warsaw, Poland), and J. L. Jensen (Nobel Laureate, Germany). 1965 - Victor Weisskopf (CERN, Geneva), Harish Chandra (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Blankenbeckler (Princeton), Keith Symon (Wisconsin), H. Ruegg (Geneva), Michel Gourdin (Orsay, Paris), Philippe Meyer (Orsay, paris), and C. de Dominicis (Paris), Gerson Goldhaber (Berkeley), Sulamith Goldhaber (Berkeley), Bruno Gruber (Southern Illinois), Y. Takahashi (Dublin) and Jayant Narlikar (Cambridge, England). 1966 - Gunnar Kallen (Sweden), T. Kotani (Tokyo), Andre Mercier (Berne, Switzerland), J. Rzewuski (Poland), H. Ruegg (Berne), Walter Hayman (Imperial College, London), Burton Moyer (Berkeley), George Sudarshan (Syracuse), A. N. Mitra (Delhi), Richard Arens (UCLA), Ernst Straus (UCLA), and Bruno Gruber (St. Louis). In what follows I have selected a few photographs of visitors to MATSCIENCE and to Ekamra Nivas during these early years of the Institute. Krishnaswami Alladi
The url of this page is http://www.krishnaswami-alladi.com/old-website/msi-early-years.html.
alladik@ufl.edu
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