Jan Łopuszański (physicist)

Prof. dr. Jan Łopuszański (Oct 21, 1923-Apr 30, 2008) was a Polish theoretical physicist and author of several textbooks about classical, statistical and quantum physics. In the field of quantum field theory, he is most famous as co-author of the Haag-Lopuszanski-Sohnius theorem concerning the possibility of supersymmetry in renormalizable QFT's.

Career

Jan Łopuszański was born October 21, 1923 in Lwów, Poland. During 1945-50 he studied physics at the University of Wrocław. In 1950, he received his M.A. in Wrocław, in 1955 his Ph. D. at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Since 1947 he was part of regular staff member at the University of Wrocław, in 1968 eh became full professor. During 1957-59 he was vice dean and during 1962-65 dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. From 1970 to 1984 he was director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics (Instytut Fizyki Teoretycznej Uniwersytet Wroclawski). From 1960 on he held the chair for mathematical methods in physics, until he retired in 1994. In 1976 he was elected corresponding member and in 1986 permanent member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and in 1996 corresponding member of the Poland Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cracow. He had visiting professorships in Utrecht, NYU, IAS in Princeton, New Jersey, SUNY at Stony Brook, University of Göttingen, Bielefeld, Max Planck Institute in Munich, CERN in Geneva and ICTP in Trieste. He was member of the editor board of Reports on Mathematical Physics and Fortschritte der Physik. He wrote about 80 original professional papers, 40 review articles and 5 major textbooks.

Personal life

J. Łopuszański was married to Barbara Zasłonka and had a son named Maciej. His hobbies are reported to be baroque music and gardening.

He died of a heart attack on April 30, 2008 in his home in Wrocław.

References

Textbooks by J. Łopuszański:
# Łopuszański, J., Pawlikowski A.: "Fizyka Statystyczna", PWN Warszawa (1969).
# Łopuszański, J.: "An Introduction to the Conventional Quantum Field Theory", Wroclaw University (1976).
# Łopuszański, J.: "Rachunek Spinorow", PWN Warszawa (1985).
# Łopuszański, J.: "Introduction to Symmetry and Supersymmetry in Quantum Field Theory", World Scientific (1991)
# Łopuszański, J.: "The Inverse Variational Problem in Classical Mechanics", Eds. Word Scientific (1999)