Nándor Balázs

Nándor Balázs (Hungarian: Balázs Nándor László, Budapest, July 7, 1926 – Setauket, New York, August 16, 2003)^[1] Hungarian-American physicist, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (from 1995).

Early life and education

Balázs attended to the Rácz private primary school and was a classmate of Janos Kemeny. Nándor Balázs received a master's degree at the University of Budapest (1948). Balázs left the communist Hungary in 1949. He received a PhD at the University of Amsterdam (1951).

Scientific career

After receiving his PhD, Balázs spent two years (1951 and 1952) as assistant to Schroedinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies,^[2] one year (autumn 1952 through summer 1953) as assistant to Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Alabama during the years 1953–56. In 1961 he went to the Stony Brook University.^[3] During his life, Balázs had close friendships and working collaborations with Schroedinger, Paul Dirac (Dirac's wife, Margit Wigner, was Hungarian), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Eugene Wigner, and other major figures in 20th-century physics.

Balázs maintained contacts in his native Hungary and occasionally brought Hungarian physicists to the US. In his collaborations with people in Budapest (notably Béla Lukács and Jozsef Zimányi), he dealt with relativistic heavy-ion collisions and thus provided a connection between Stony Brook (a home of RHIC theory) and Hungary.

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