Nicholas Kurti
Professor Nicholas Kurti FRS (1908- November 24, 1998) was a Hungarian born Physicist.
Born in Budapest, he went to high school at the Minta Gymnasium, but due to anti-Jewish laws he had to leave the country, gaining his masters degree at the Sorbonne in Paris. He obtained his doctorate in low-temperature physics in Berlin, working with Professor Franz Eugene Simon. However, when Adolph Hitler rose to power, both Simon and Kurti left Germany, joining the Clarendon Laboratory in the University of Oxford, England.
During World War II he worked on the Atomic bomb project, returning to Oxford in 1945. In 1956, Simon and Kurti built a laboratory experiment that reached a temperature of one microkelvin. This work attracted worldwide attention, and Kurti was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He later became the society's Vice-President from 1965 to 1967
He became Professor of Physics at Oxford in 1967, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. He was also Visiting Professor at City College in New York, the University of California in Berkeley, and Amherst College in Massachusetts.
His hobby was cooking, and among his achievements were a reversed baked Alaska (frozen on the outside and hot inside) and organising several international workshops in Erice, Italy on "Molecular and Physical Gastronomy.
Bibliography
- But the Crackling is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of The Royal Society of London ISBN 075030488X
External links
Categories: Hungarian physicists | Physicists