Nicholas Kurti

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Nicholas Kurti CBE ( Hungarian Kürti Miklós ) (born May 14, 1908 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary , † November 24, 1998 in Oxford ) was a Hungarian-British low-temperature physicist .

Life

Kurti's father, whose ancestors were called Karfunkel until the Magyarization , was a banker, but died around 1911. The bank granted his mother, whose ancestors probably came from Galicia and had settled in Abony , a pension and contributed half of Kurti's training costs.

He attended the Minta High School in his hometown. Since a numerus clausus also applied to Jews in Hungary , he had to continue his further education abroad. His uncle Jozsef Pinter (originally Binder from Abony, 1858–1928) was an electrical engineer and vice-president at Tungsram in Budapest and helped him with his training. Kurti initially wanted to study chemistry, but the senior physicist Jakab Szentpeter explained to him in 1924 that there were already too many chemists and that he should study applied physics in order to earn money. With a letter of recommendation from a Viennese professor, he went to Paul Langevin at the Sorbonne in Paris , where he obtained his master's degree. He obtained his doctorate in low-temperature physics in Berlin from Franz Eugen Simon . From 1931 to 1933 he worked as an assistant at the Technical University in Breslau.

After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Kurti emigrated. He followed Simon to the University of Oxford's Clarendon Laboratory , where he was hired as his assistant.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Kurti as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be succeeded by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

During World War II, Kurti worked on the Manhattan Project . With Simon he worked out the basics for uranium enrichment by means of gas diffusion. He returned to Oxford in 1945 and married Giana the following year, with whom he had two children. After he and Simon had succeeded in cooling a substance to a temperature of one micro kelvin in a laboratory experiment in 1956 , he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , of which he was Vice President from 1965 to 1967 . In 1968 he was also accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Since 1975 he was a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR .

From 1967 until his retirement in 1975 he was Professor of Physics at Oxford. He has held visiting professorships at City College of New York , the University of California, Berkeley, and Amherst College , Massachusetts.

Kurti was a hobby cook. When microwave ovens appeared around 1969, he introduced the Royal Society to an inverted Baked Alaska (cold outside and hot inside). He founded what he called gastrophysics ( molecular cuisine ).

Publications

  • Giana Kurti: But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society ; ISBN 0-85274-301-7

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ JH Sanders: Nicholas Kurti, CBE May 14, 1908 - November 24, 1998: Elected FRS 1956. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 46, 2000, pp. 299-315, doi : 10.1098 / rsbm.1999.0086 .
  2. ^ Entry on Kurti on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).
  3. ^ Members of the previous academies. Nicholas Kürti (Kurti). Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on March 30, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Kurti, Nicholas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-British low temperature physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1998
Place of death Oxford