Nandor Balazs
Laszlo Nandor Balazs (Hungarian Balázs Nándor, * July 7, 1926 in Budapest, † August 16, 2003 in Setauket, New York ) was a Hungarian- American theoretical physicist.
Balazs studied at the University of Budapest ( diploma 1948) and had his first publication in 1949 in the journal Nature. After the communist takeover, he left Hungary and studied from 1950 at the University of Amsterdam, where he received his doctorate in 1951. 1951/52, was Erwin Schrödinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study. Through the mediation of Schrödinger he went to Princeton a year after Albert Einstein to the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1953 he was at the University of Alabama (where he was Associate Professor ) and 1955 at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. In 1959 he was an advisor to General Atomics in La Jolla and in the same year in Princeton at the Laboratory of Plasma Physics. In 1961 he went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he was professor and stayed the rest of his career. He has been a visiting scientist at the University of California, San Diego, the universities of Munich, Heidelberg, Zurich, Oxford, Cambridge, at the Research Centre Jülich, the Nuclear Research Centre in Saclay, at the Institute for Nuclear Physics in Orsay and regularly at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
He dealt for example with nuclear physics, semi-classical developments in quantum mechanics, information theory, statistical mechanics and quantum chaos. He worked with Michael Berry together (from 1978 ) and André Voros and Roger Balian in Saclay. In nuclear physics, he worked for example on relativistic heavy-ion scattering as they were carried out at RHIC near Stony Brook.
In addition to physics he had as a hobby fencing (he was in Hungary champion in foil ), horse riding and sailing.
Writings
- With André Voros Chaos on the pseudosphere, Physics Reports, Volume 143, 1986, p 109
- With Michael Berry Evolution of semiclassical quantum states in phase space, J.Phys.A, Volume 12, 1979, pp. 625-642
- With Voros, Berry, Tabor Quantum maps, Annals of Physics, Volume 122, 1979, pp. 26-63