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Death notice
Oleksa‑Myron Petrovych Bilaniuk
15 December 1926 - 27 March 2009
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA
Submitted by Mark Heald
Published on 02 April 2009
Oleksa‑ Myron Petrovych Bilaniuk, Centennial Professor Emeritus of Physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and former President of The Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S.A., died on March 27, 2009, at home after a year‑long battle with brain cancer. He was 82.
Prof. Bilaniuk was born on December 15, 1926 in the Lemkivshchyna district in the Carpathian Mountains near the Ukraine‑Poland‑Slovak border. During World War II he was interned to work on a German farm, and then liberated by the US Army in 1945, ending up in a displaced‑persons camp in Germany. He eventually received a scholarship to the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, where he studied engineering. He came to the United States in 1951, after winning a scholarship to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. There he earned two B.S.E.s and two M.A.s in mathematics and physics, and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics. In 1960‑62, at the University of Rochester, he collaborated with his colleague and friend George Sudarshan to prove that the possible existence of superluminal particles (tachyons) is consistent with Einsteinian Relativity. Their publications (Am.J.Phys. 1962, Phys.Today 1969) were seminal.
Bilaniuk joined the physics faculty of Swarthmore College in 1964, where he was an innovative and beloved teacher. During many sabbaticals he conducted nuclear research at leading accelerators in the U.S.A., Germany, France, Ukraine, and Italy. Some of his work involved proving the existence of He2 (the diproton), neutron‑neutron quasi‑free scattering, and nuclear reactions induced by 60‑MeV gamma rays.
Professor Bilaniuk officially retired from Swarthmore College in 1990, but continued to teach occasional classes there and remained active in Ukrainian‑American scientific organizations until 2008. He was very involved in editorial work, serving as the physics editor and editorial board member for the five‑volume Encyclopedia of Ukraine, published between 1984‑1993, and on the editorial board of the Ukrainian Journal of Physics beginning in 1991. He was elected a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1992. He served as President of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S.A. from 1998 to 2006, and in 2007 was awarded a medal of recognition for his service by Ukrainian President Yushchenko. He also collaborated with Ukrainian lexicographers on a 100,000‑word English‑Ukrainian‑English Dictionary of Physics and Technology, to be published in 2009.
Oleksa‑Myron Bilaniuk was a certified FAA glider and single‑engine pilot and flight instructor, an avid world traveler, and fluent speaker of eight languages. He is survived by his wife of 44 years, Larissa, two daughters and three grandchildren.
Mark Heald
Swarthmore College emeritus
Pleasant Hill, TN
Current comments and reminiscences on Oleksa‑Myron Petrovych Bilaniuk
I knew "Alex" well as a fellow graduate student at Michigan in the early 1950's. (I finished my degree in the same group in 1955.) Alex's experiences in WWII were so extraordinary compared with my own; I especially remember how his opinion of the German "liberators" changed quickly. He was an amazing man in his youth, and his subsequent adventures both terrestrial and aloft showed he didn't slow down!
William J. Childs
Lombard, IL
I had the privilege to collaborate with Alex (Oleksa) at the Synchrocyclotron Laboratory (Buenos Aires) in the early sixties. There with Jorge Rosenblatt we had succeeded to extract the beam of the 28 MeV machine, the highest low energy beam in the world (below 100 MeV). Alex was invited to assist the team and he was able to secure a shipment of 3He from the US AEC. We carried out an experiment of the reaction 3He(D,T)2He and were successful in observing the 2He or diproton peak, for the first time in the history of nuclear physics. There were plenty of handwaving statements of diffident colleagues concerning the possibility of observing the 2He peak. But it was there to stay!! It corresponds to a peculiar pole of the S-matrix as determined by L.P. Kok (See O.M. Bilaniuk and R. J. Slobodrian, Phys.Canada, Vol. 59 No.4, 2003 and Refs. therein). I have kept in touch with Alex for many years and I am deeply saddened by the loss of a remarkable colleague and friend.
R. J. Slobodrian
Universite Laval
Quebec, Canada