Sergio Fubini
Encyclopedia
Sergio Fubini was an Italian
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 theoretical physicist. He was one of the pioneers of string theory
String theory
String theory is an active research framework in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a contender for a theory of everything , a manner of describing the known fundamental forces and matter in a mathematically complete system...

. Politically he engaged himself actively for peace in the Middle East.

Biography

Fubini was born in Turin, from where he fled in 1938 as a politically persecuted Jew into Switzerland. Starting from 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 and from 1958 to 1967 at CERN
CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...

 in Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...

. In 1959 he became a professor for nuclear physics at University of Padua
University of Padua
The University of Padua is a premier Italian university located in the city of Padua, Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 as a school of law and was one of the most prominent universities in early modern Europe. It is among the earliest universities of the world and the second...

 and in 1961 a professor for theoretical physics at University of Turin
University of Turin
The University of Turin is a university in the city of Turin in the Piedmont region of north-western Italy...

. From 1968 to 1973 he was at MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, but however taught summer courses in Turin, and starting from 1973 again at the CERN, where he was from 1971 to 1980 member of the advisory board and had an important role in planning the Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP). At MIT he was with his pupil Gabriele Veneziano
Gabriele Veneziano
Gabriele Veneziano, born in Florence, Italy), is an Italian theoretical physicist and the founder of string theory. . Has spent most of his scientific activities at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland...

 at the center of an active school of theoretical physicist with close connections to Italy (with one of the Italian INFN
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
The Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare is the coordinating institution for nuclear, particle and astroparticle physics in Italy. It was founded on the 8th of August 1951, to further the nuclear physics research tradition initiated by Enrico Fermi in Rome, in the 1930s...

 and MIT financed "Bruno Rossi" exchange programs). He and his co-workers did fundamental work in string theory
String theory
String theory is an active research framework in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a contender for a theory of everything , a manner of describing the known fundamental forces and matter in a mathematically complete system...

. (Other well-known MIT colleagues at that time were Victor Weisskopf, who was recruited by Fubini to MIT, Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....

, Roman Jackiw
Roman Jackiw
Roman W. Jackiw is a theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallist. Born in Poland, Jackiw received his PhD from Cornell University in 1966 under Hans Bethe and Kenneth Wilson...

). From 1994 to 2001 he was a professor in Turin. Fubini worked in the 1960s on current algebra
Current algebra
Current algebra is a mathematical framework in quantum field theory where the fields form a Lie algebra under their commutation relations.For instance, in a non-Abelian Yang–Mills symmetry, where ρ is the charge density,...

s and S-matrix theory (Regge
Tullio Regge
Tullio Regge is an Italian theoretical physicist. He obtained a degree in physics from the University of Turin in 1952, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Rochester in 1957 under the direction of Robert Marshak. From 1958 to 1959 Regge held a post at the Max Planck Institute for...

 - trajectories among other things), in particular on their field-theoretical foundations. In the 1970s he was with his MIT colleague and pupil Gabriele Veneziano one of the pioneers of string theory
String theory
String theory is an active research framework in particle physics that attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. It is a contender for a theory of everything , a manner of describing the known fundamental forces and matter in a mathematically complete system...

. He worked in the 1970s also among other things on classical solutions of Yang-Mills equations and conformally invariant quantum field theory(Nuovo Cimento 1976).

He was married since 1956 to Marina Colombo and had a daughter.

Honors

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

External links

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