Abdus Salam

Salam, Abdus 

Born Jan. 29, 1926, in Jhang Maghiana. Pakistani physicist.

Salam graduated from Cambridge University in 1951. He was a professor at Government College in Lahore from 1951 to 1954 and a lecturer at Cambridge from 1954 to 1956; in 1957 he became a professor at the University of London. In 1964 he became director of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. He was chief scientific adviser to the president of Pakistan from 1961 to 1974 and was chairman of the UN Advisory Committee on Science and Technology in 1971.

Salam’s main works deal with quantum electrodynamics and the theory of elementary particles. He has contributed to work on problems of renormalization, and he was the first to call attention to the significance of overlap divergences and to point out ways of constructing theories that are amenable to renormalization. He has worked on a uniform theory of weak and electromagnetic interactions, the theory of symmetry, and the quark model of elementary particles. He has been a member of the London Royal Society since 1959 and a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1971.

WORKS

“The Renormalization of Meson Theories.” Reviews of Modern Physics, 1951, vol. 23, no. 4. (With P. T. Matthews.)
“Electromagnetic and Weak Interactions.” Physics Letters, 1964, vol. 13, no. 2. (With J. C. Ward.)
Fundamental Theory of Matter. Trieste, 1968.

I. D. ROZHANSKII