Mikhail Shifman
I was born on April 4, 1949, in Riga, Latvia, into the family of a civil engineer. He was sent there to rebuild bridges destroyed by the retreating German army at the end of WWII. Shortly after, my father was transferred to Ukraine, and then to Moscow. I received university education in Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology (1966-1972). In 1972 I was accepted to a graduate program at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), Moscow. PhD (1976) from ITEP on the topic of the penguin mechanism of weak flavor-changing decays.
I stayed with ITEP till my departure for the US in 1990. Since 1990, I am a member of the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota and the Ida Cohen Fine Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota.
My area of expertise is quantum chromodynamics and supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories at strong coupling. I has had the honor of receiving a number of international prizes including the Alexander von Humboldt Award (1993), Sakurai Prize (1999), Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize (2006), Pomeranchuk Prize (2013), and the Dirac Medal (2016).
Supervisors: Lev Okun (1970-1972) and Boris Ioffe (1972-1975)
I stayed with ITEP till my departure for the US in 1990. Since 1990, I am a member of the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota and the Ida Cohen Fine Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota.
My area of expertise is quantum chromodynamics and supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories at strong coupling. I has had the honor of receiving a number of international prizes including the Alexander von Humboldt Award (1993), Sakurai Prize (1999), Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize (2006), Pomeranchuk Prize (2013), and the Dirac Medal (2016).
Supervisors: Lev Okun (1970-1972) and Boris Ioffe (1972-1975)
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Caught between two evils -- German National Socialism
and Soviet Communism -- Charlotte Houtermans would have likely perished if it were not for the brotherhood of physicists: Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Max Born, Robert Oppenheimer and many other noted scientists who tried to save friends and colleagues (either leftist sympathizers or Jews) who were in mortal danger of becoming entrapped in a simmering pre-WWII Europe.
This book is based on newly discovered documents from the Houtermans family archive, including Pauli's numerous letters to Houtermans, her correspondence with other great physicists, her diaries, and interviews with her children. Almost all documents presented in this book are being published for the first time.
The response of the readers was overwhelming. In this unpublished Epilogue I collected some of the materials I obtained in the aftermath of the book release. Most of them are in English, although some Russian documents are occasionally present.
and trailblazers of supersymmetry descended on FTPI, as well as a large
crowd of younger theorists deeply involved in research in this area. Remarkably, it was at this event that many of the early pioneers of the field met face-to-face for the first time. The First Edition of this book was released in 2000, just before the symposium
“Thirty Years of Supersymmetry” was held at the William I. Fine Theoretical
Physics Institute (FTPI) of the University of Minnesota. Founders
and trailblazers of supersymmetry descended on FTPI, as well as a large
crowd of younger theorists deeply involved in research in this area. Remarkably, it was at this event that many of the early pioneers of the field met face-to-face for the first time. Almost all of the early explorers of supersymmetry, its founding fathers, have left our world after 2000. On the other hand, significant new advances occurred in the last 25 years.
The conference 50 Years of Supersymmetry (SUSY 50) was organized by FTPI, University of Minnesota, on May 18-20, 2023. The second addition includes reports from SUSY 50 and many other materials which were unavailable at the time of the first edition. The present article combines introductions to the second and first editions. Their comparison is quite curious.
States I got a letter from Professor Hector Rubinstein who at that time was the Coordinating Editor of Current Physics/Sources and Comments, a serial North-Holland publication of reprint volumes on high-energy physics. Each volume was supposed to present a selection of essential source material on a given important topic compiled by an independent specialist editor, supplemented by extensive editorial commentaries and mini-reviews. Professor Rubinstein invited me to make a volume devoted to the QCD sum rules. [This project was aborted in 1992. In fact, the Volume Vacuum Structure and QCD Sum Rules (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1992) of which I was the editor, was the tenth and the last in the series.] After some hesitations I agreed. The work turned out to be much more time and labor-consuming than I had expected. In several cases (Chapter 1, 8 and in some other cases) I failed to find among the published papers the one which I could consider satisfactory; then I had to write the corresponding sections myself. Hector's idea was to put a historical introduction/foreword, which I was supposed to write, in the beginning of the book. By deadline I had only an unpolished and unfinished draft. Other urgent commitments prevented me from completing the article in time. Therefore, I had to settle for a short technical foreword which appeared in print in 1992. The original rather long Foreword has never been published. I used edited fragments of this article in various later publications. Presented below is the original draft
" You Just Failed Your Math Test, Comrade Einstein", World Scientific, Singapore, 2005
in Moscow. This memoir lecture was delivered in Russian and remains unknown in the West. I translated it to English and added a few footnotes where necessary. The original Russian version was published in Kvant, (Moscow), Rannie gody kvantovoj mekhaniki, in Russian, No. 10, 1988.
A revised version of a chapter from Love and Physics by M. Shifman
http://www.tc.umn.edu/marqu002/memoirs.html
but then the personal web-sites of this type were retired by the University of Minnesota. I could not find its replacement. If you want to understand, at least approximately, the mindset of such people and the degree of ideological indoctrination, I advise you to read the manuscript below. I managed to copy a draft from the above personal web-site before its retirement. This is Part II (I added an Appendix).
http://www.tc.umn.edu/marqu002/memoirs.html
but then the personal web-sites of this type were retired by the University of Minnesota. I could not find its replacement. If you want to understand, at least approximately, the mindset of such people and the degree of ideological indoctrination, I advise you to read the manuscript below. I managed to copy a draft from the above personal web-site before its retirement. This is Part I.