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Manoj Kanti Banerjee |
Death notice
Manoj Kanti Banerjee
25 May 1931 - 18 February 2006
Bethesda, MD
University of Maryland
Submitted by Stephen J. Wallace and James J. Griffin
Published on 22 June 2006
Manoj Kanti Banerjee, a prominent and brilliant theoretical nuclear physicist, passed away February 18, 2006 from arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. He had recovered from a serious heart attack in 1978. His health had declined slowly following a recurrence in 1997 and heart bypass surgery in 1998. Manoj's beloved wife, Uma, died in 1995.
Born May 25, 1931, in Patna India, Manoj was educated at Patna University and Calcutta University. As a lecturer at the Palit Research Laboratory in Physics of the University of Calcutta, his early studies in nuclear beta decay were supervised by Professor A. K. Saha. Following the death of Professor Saha, the institute was renamed the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1956.
Banerjee first came to the United States in 1955 as a research fellow at Princeton University to work with E. P. Wigner, who later was awarded the Nobel Prize. He performed important work with Carl A. Levinson to develop the theory of direct nuclear reactions and provide the first serious calculations of nuclear reaction cross sections using computers of the late fifties. He and a student also performed the first shell model calculations using the Breuckner G-matrix interaction.
Banerjee returned to the Saha Institute in 1957 to accept a position as Reader, he left again in 1959 for a year at Princeton as Research Associate, and returned again to Saha Institute in 1960 as Professor. He visited the Weizman Institute, Israel, during the 1962-63 year.
Manoj Banerjee joined the faculty of the Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, in 1966 as a professor of physics. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and served on the editorial board of Physical Review Letters. He held visiting professor positions at the University of Manchester, England, the University of Washington, Seattle, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the National Taiwan University and he was a Weizman Institute Fellow. In 1996-97, he was a recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists and spent most of a year at the KFA, Inst. for Kernphysik, Juelich, Germany. However, because of deteriorating health he cut short his visit in order to return to the U.S. Banerjee retired from the University of Maryland teaching faculty in 2001. He continued his association with the Department of Physics as a Senior Research Scientist and Professor Emeritus.
Manoj was a teacher and an intellectual leader. He possessed an uncommon intensity and he cared very much about reaching a high level of truth and understanding grounded in fundamental principles. Over his career, he supervised the research of 22 Ph.D. students, ten of whom were students at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. One of his former students said ``I will never forget his contagious passion for doing physics''. He had a very gentle nature with regard to personal interactions.
In the 1970s, Banerjee became interested in the fundamental dynamics of mesons and nucleons in order to understand better their roles in the formation of nuclei. In 1978, he and a student developed a notable theory of the interactions of a pi-meson with a nucleon that provided new insights into the sigma term that controls s-wave pion-nucleon interactions.
In 1981, Manoj was asked to return to the Saha Institute to accept the directorship, a selection that was announced on the front page of the Times of India. Ultimately, he declined the position out of concern that its administrative burdens would make it impossible for him to continue his research.
In 1984 he and collaborators developed a chiral soliton model of the nucleon and delta resonance that was based on quarks interacting with a pion cloud. This much-cited model and variants of it that were developed by other workers have provided valuable insights into the dynamics of mesons and nuclei.
Manoj's enthusiasm for the interplay of new ideas and new research directions was a hallmark of his career. He is missed by his colleagues at Maryland and his students and friends everywhere.
Stephen J. Wallace and James J. Griffin
University of Maryland
College Park, MD
Current comments and reminiscences on Manoj Kanti Banerjee:
This is sad news.
Iwao Ogawa, Professor Emeritus of Rikkyo University, Tokyo,
who was the last survivor among the participants at the First
Pugwash Conference in 1957, passed away in Tokyo, Japan,
on June 13, 2006 at the age of 84; by lung cancer.
He attended eight Pugwash Conferences in 1957, 1958, 1962,
1967, 1977, 1981, 1987, 1995 and three Symposiums in 1975,
1989, 1997, including the Symposium held at Pugwash, Nova Scotia,
Canada to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the First Conference.
He gave various contributions to radiation physics and nuclear physics. He watched the Hiroshima Bomb explosion from a distance in 1945. He measured and analysed radioactive fallout from surface and atmospheric nuclear weapon tests in the 1950's.
The funeral will be held at Myofukuji Temple, Tokyo at 10:30 am
(in Japanese standard time, which is ahead by 9 hours from
the universal Greenwich time) on June 16, 2006.
He is survived by his wife Ikuko and two sons.
Pugwash Japan
Iwao Ogawa was the only Japanese nuclear physicist known to have observed the 1945 explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. At the time, he was teaching at the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, 10 miles south of the city. Almost immediately he organized research groups to study the explosion, and came to the conclusion that it was an atomic weapon, something he knew that two groups in Japan had been working on.
In an New York Times article published in 1982, he said ''Our first clue was that X-ray film in the hospitals had all been blackened, exposed.... 'That could only have happened by radiation. We also had seismologists who measured the distance from Hiroshima at which gravestones had been toppled. Their estimate of the bomb's size proved very accurate."
''The bomb was a terrible thing.... 'But until it was dropped, the navy officers were very confident they could fight on. After it, they came to me and asked for books about physics. It may have shortened the war.''
Ogawa, was one of three Japanese delegates to the first meeting between American and Soviet Scientists during the Cold War. The meeting, in Pugwash Nova Scotia, led to the formation of Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs, and led the groundwork to the 1963 Atomspheric Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and to the biological and chemcial weapons conventions.
Paul Guinnessy