Nándor Balázs

Nándor Balázs was a Hungarian-American physicist, external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Early life and education

Balázs attended to the Rácz private primary school and was a classmate of Janos Kemeny.
Nándor Balázs received a master's degree at the University of Budapest. Balázs left communist Hungary in 1949. He received a PhD at the University of Amsterdam.

Scientific career

After receiving his PhD, Balázs spent two years as assistant to Schroedinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, one year as assistant to Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was associate professor of physics at the University of Alabama during the years 1953-56. From 1956 to 1959, he was research associate at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and then became a research staff member at the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University from 1959 to 1961. In 1961 he went to the Stony Brook University.
During his life, Balázs had close friendships and working collaborations
with Schroedinger, Paul Dirac, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Eugene Wigner, and other major figures in 20th-century physics.
Balázs maintained contacts in his native Hungary and occasionally brought Hungarian
physicists to the US. In his collaborations with people in Budapest, he dealt with relativistic heavy-ion collisions and thus provided a connection between Stony Brook and Hungary.
Papers:
Effect of a gravitational field, due to a rotating body, on the plane of polarization of an electromagnetic wave. Phys. Rev. 110, 236–239
EINSTEIN: Theory of Relativity. Gillispie Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. IV, 319-332