A day-long symposium saluting Dr. George B. Benedek on his 65th birthday has been organized by his MIT colleagues. Dr. Benedek is the Alfred P. Caspary Professor of Physics and Biological Physics.
The May 20 event will be held in Rm 6-120 starting at 9am with remarks by Professor Ernest Moniz, head of the Department of Physics. Professor Toyoichi Tanaka, chairman of the organizing committee, will deliver concluding remarks starting at 4:05pm.
In between scientists from MIT, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Milan and Harvard University will present papers on a variety of topics dealing with physical, biological and medical physics, a field to which Professor Benedek has made many important contributions.
He is recognized for both the originality and diversity of his work and has contributed to a wide variety of fields into which physicists by tradition and training seldom venture. His research activity has encompassed nuclear magnetic resonance, semiconductor physics, the physics of high pressures and shock waves, critical phenomena in ferromagnets and fluids, quasielastic light-scattering spectroscopy, the theory of the transparency of the eye, the physics of enzymes, the dynamics of viscoelastic gels, and the mechanism by which antibody and antigen molecules form clumps in the body.
Professor Benedek, who turned 65 on December 1, received the BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1949) and the AM (1952) and the PhD (1953) from Harvard, all in physics. He joined MIT in 1961 as an associate professor and became professor of physics in 1965.
A version of this article appeared in the May 18, 1994 issue of MIT Tech Talk (Volume 38, Number 33).
