Marcos Moshinsky

Marcos Moshinsky ( born April 20, 1921 in Kiev, Ukraine, † April 1, 2009 in Mexico City) was a Mexican theoretical physicist.

Life

Moshinsky emigrated with his Jewish family at the age of three years to Mexico, where he was naturalized in 1942. He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico ( UNAM) and 1949 at Princeton University, where he earned his doctorate under Eugene Wigner. After that, he was in 1954 at the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris ( with a grant from the CNRS) and was from 1962 professor at the UNAM.

Moshinsky employed in the 1950s with nuclear reactions and turned the group theory of harmonic oscillators ( which are described by unitary groups) in nuclear physics and beyond. In the 1970s he studied collective excitations in nuclei ( the Bohr - Mottelson model and Bosonenmodelle ) with group theoretical methods, but also solid-state problems and the quark model.

In 1959 he was Sloan Fellow. In 1968 he received the Mexican National Prize for Science, 1971 Luis Elizondo Prize, in 1988 the Prince of Asturias Award in 1997 and the UNESCO Prize. In 1998 he received the Wigner Medal. In 1967 he was president of the Mexican Physical Society. He was inducted into the Colegio Nacional ( a Mexican Academy of Arts and Sciences ) in 1972. He holds honorary doctorates from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

Moshinsky also wrote a weekly political column for a long time in the Mexican newspaper Excelsior.

Writings

• Group theory and the many body trouble, Macmillan 1968
• The harmonic oscillator in modern physics: from atoms to quarks, re-edited in 1996 with Yuri Smirnov
• Groups in physics: Collective model of the nucleus, Canonical transformations in quantum mechanics, University of Montreal Press 1979