Dr Eli Ben-Naim

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:My high school mathematics and physics teachers, who challenged and interested me in a deep way, are responsible for me being a research scientist. My thesis adviser, Sidney Redner, showed me the beauty of statistical physics, and led me into this specific research area.

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Dr Olivier Bénichou

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Initially, I wanted to become a science teacher and during my studies I have been fascinated by statistical physics. Then I attended a wonderful course about stochastic processes that triggered something in my mind.

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Dr Marek Czachor

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I’ve always wanted to be some kind of discoverer. As a kid I imagined a scientist as someone who stays at night in his lab, alone in a deserted building, and is doing something extremely important, which nobody else understands. First I thought of astronomy, then chemistry (I had a chemical lab in my room when I was 12), and finally – when I was around 17 - I realized that these fields are not fundamental enough. It was Andrzej Posiewnik, a theoretical physicist and very good climber whom I knew from mountains, who helped me to make up my mind. He asked: What do you want to do - work in a lab, or just think with a pencil in your hand? I definitely preferred a pencil. So I become a theorist, and he took care of my education. He was an ideal tutor. He was bringing interesting papers, books that were completely away of the mainstream university education. After a year I started to learn quantum mechanics, but from the books by David Bohm, that were not completely orthodox. I remember I tried to read papers by David Finkelstein, which were of course too difficult, but they were showing the principle Andrzej wanted me to internalize – that physics is not finished, and one should always return to the big questions. He gave me freedom and always had time for discussions. I owe him a lot. Then I read about Bell’s theorem. I felt it was the most interesting thing I’d ever heard of. The next turning point was when Ryszard Horodecki, whose course of quantum mechanics I was attending, told me that what he doesn’t like about the Bell inequality is that everyone speaks there of superluminal signals, but they formulate it in terms of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. I knew I found my first target as a scientist. I was 21 when we talked about it, 24 when I had the relativistic formulation, and… 37 when I published the paper. So when a few years after my publication some colleagues rediscovered the result, I was determined to fight for being quoted. I simply felt sentiment for this work...

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Professor Rossen Dandoloff

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I had the good fortune to be ushered into science and especially into physics by a very good physics teacher Mr. Hristo Dimitrov. Later on my participation in the Physics Olympiad even strengthen my interest in Physics.

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Professor Maurice de Gosson

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I remember that when I was seven years old newspapers headlines were about the death of a great man, Albert Einstein; my grandmother who was an enlightened amateur scientist explained to me what Einstein’s most popular achievement -the theory of relativity- was about; I was fascinated but I didn’t of course understanding anything! The next, and definitive, impetus came two years later when the first Sputnik was launched; I wanted to construct and launch my own satellite, and started learning physics from high school books. Of course I first had to learn relatively advanced math, and this is why I eventually became a mathematician; I am now returning to my first love, physics! But I have abandoned (momentarily?) my plans to launch a satellite.

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Professor Yuanan Diao

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I was placed as an engineering major in a Chinese tech university when I was admitted to that university, but that was nearly 30 years ago and things have definitely changed. A year later I was given the chance to become a mathematics major and I switched my major without hesitation. Mathematics had always been my favorite subject because of its clarity and beauty. During my graduate study at Florida State University, De Witt Sumners, my thesis advisor, showed me the potential applications of knot theory in physics and biology. Especially intriguing and interesting to me was the knotting problem of random polygons (a model for polymers and DNA). That was when I started working in this field.

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Professor Gerald Dunne

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I always enjoyed mathematics and physics, although at high school I was much more interested in literature and art. As an undergraduate I was fortunate to study at the University of Adelaide in the Department of Mathematical Physics. In particular, courses in General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics captured my imagination and steered me towards mathematical and theoretical physics. Bert Green and Angas Hurst were particularly influential to me in presenting this field as one of philosophical, as well as scientific, interest.

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Professor Dr Detlef Dürr

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I found my high school experimentally based physics in the beginning of very little interest, but when my older brother explained to me how electro magnetic fields can make electrons move and seeing that from physical laws by way of algebraic manipulations new insights can arise I wanted nothing more than to become a physicist. The subject I am working in now is the foundations of physics, in particular quantum mechanics. The person who brought me into this field is my friend and collaborator Sheldon Goldstein from Rutgers.

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Dr Klaus Kirsten

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I think the main reasons to study physics were my physics teacher, and Hoimar von Ditfurth, a German author of popular science books. At the age of about 17 I read Im Anfang war der Wasserstoff (Translation: In the beginning there was hydrogen.) in which the evolution of the universe and of life on earth was described. This raised my interest in cosmology, and together with the enthusiasm shown by my physics teacher this was responsible for my decision.

The reason to work in my area of research, which is quantum field theory under the influence of external conditions, might be a little unusual. Mainly I have chosen this area because the mathematics involved is so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, and because it is actually applied to some interesting physics.

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Professor Yuji Kodama

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I started with an engineering major, but always wanted to work on problems in mathematical physics. When I was a graduate student of Electrical Engineering, my advisor suggested me to read the paper The soliton: a new concept in applied science [Proc. IEEE 61 (1973) 1443-1483] by Scott, Chu and McLaughlin. I was so lucky to meet this paper, and fell immediately in love with Soliton. Since then I have been working on the area called integrable systems (i.e. soliton theory in a wide sense), and even today I am totally amazed by finding several deep connections of the theory of integrable systems with many other fields of research in mathematics and physics.

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Dr Alex A Lushnikov

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:His Majesty Chance. Being a schoolboy I dreamt about the profession of radio-engineer. Right after the school finals I decided to bring my application to the Moscow Energy Institute (MEI). But chance saw about otherwise. I forgot my passport. On returning home I discovered that I had no money to pay the fare for my trip back to MEI. The nearest Institute to my home was Moscow Engineering-Physical Institute, where I applied to the Faculty of Theoretical and Experimental Physics. On graduating from there I became a specialist on theoretical physics. I began as a nuclear physicist. After the defence of my candidate degree (approximately PhD) I decided to study nuclear reactions on light nuclei. I took an issue of Review of Modern Physics with a review article on this item, and accidentally opened it on the page with a review on Ising problem. I began to read. And all my interest in nuclear physics was immediately killed. I was infected with the beauty of the Onsager solution to this problem. Since then I tried to attack several very hard exactly-solvable problems of theoretical physics, but with no real success. In desperation, I changed my speciality to physics and chemistry of aerosols. Since then (1971) I became an aerosol physicist. In 1972, for the first time in my life, I saw the Smoluchowskii equation. I decided that it is for me. And since then I became a specialist in coagulation, although other problems of aerosol physics and chemistry are not clear of my interests.

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Dr Jean-Marie Maillard

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I have always been mesmerized by exact results and discrete effective mathematics with rigid and highly non trivial constrained structures. Not surprisingly I decided to work in integrable models in lattice statistical mechanics and, in the last decade, also on discrete dynamical (birational) systems. Even more than getting new exact results, I am motivated by creating new tools to find such new exact results.

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Dr Francesca Marchetti

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I started being interested in solid-state physics between the end of my undergraduate studies and the beginning of my PhD. In reality, in the last year of university, I mostly choose courses in high energy physics and quantum field theory, and worked on a related problem for my diploma thesis. However, it didn't take me long to realise that I would more enjoy doing research in a field where the experiments are on much smaller scales and where, in this sense, the contacts with experiments would be more accessible to a theorist. What instead has led me into physics is a much less linear process. Before starting university, I always thought I would have continued studying to become a musician.

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Professor Juan Carlos Marrero

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Since I was young, I was attracted by Science, in particular Physics and Mathematics, probably due to the systematic behaviour and the accuracy that is present in these disciplines. When I finished my undergraduate studies at the University I decided to start doing research. I must admit that, when I began with my research, I was not sure about which area I preferred. Then, the interrelated character and the beauty of the Differential Geometry along with the help of certain people made me to direct my research in that field, more precisely, to study the interaction between Differential Geometry and Mathematical Physics. With all that, I have found several times that the perfection and beauty of Mathematics can be translated to many phenomena in Nature. I think this is a fascinating world!

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Professor Ralf Metzler

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:When I was a child of maybe eight, we had a sort of Open University programme on the television just before prime time. I loved to watch the chemistry programme with all the reactions going on. Over time, however, I started to prefer the physics programme, appreciating how simple it appeared. I guess this got my mind going. Originally, I wanted to get into experiments, but when we had all the lab courses at university, I quickly became a devoted theorist. I haven't regretted it.

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Professor Kimball A Milton

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:When I was 9 or so, I was reading a high-school level science textbook (I guess I already had such an interest) and decided I wanted to build a telegraph set. I asked my dad how to construct it and described my ideas. Rather than telling me how to do it, he said I should find a book in the library. Exactly the right answer! I started learning about electricity and I was hooked. I have now written two graduate textbooks on electrodynamics!

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Dr Takaaki Monnai

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I wanted to understand the gap between the microscopic reversibility and macroscopic irreversibility. When I was an undergraduate student, many experiments for meso-scaled systems were achieved where the fluctuation of environment(s) is essential. For example, using optical tweezers, Feynman-ratchet like system is observed. Those experiments made me interested in the theoretical study of the second law of thermodynamics in meso-system.

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Dr Prasanta Panigrahi

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:During my early days in school, I had felt that either writing poetry or being a scientist would be a satisfying occupation in life. The former choice was too formidable for me and hence I was propelled towards science. In hindsight, being close to nature in my childhood and having plenty of time to myself made me curious about objects and happenings around me. This led to one query after another, which has landed me up in theoretical physics. I must admit that a long drawn experiment to produce a mini tractor in my school days has probably contributed towards my evolution into a theoretical physicist.

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Dr Nuno M Romao

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:At school, I was interested (among other things) in the natural sciences and in mathematics. I then thought physics would be a subject where I could be involved with both. As a student, I became increasingly interested in mathematics and the more conceptual aspects of physics, and this led me to concentrate on the theory of elementary particles and later on mathematical physics.

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Professor Sriram Shastry

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I entered science somewhat tentatively, until I discovered condensed matter physics in graduate school. I found that the physics of matter is exciting and broad, one could do many different things under its umbrella, ranging from abstract mathematical physics to phenomenology, each feeding back and nourishing the other. A perfect field for those who enjoy roaming around!

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Dr Julien Tailleur

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:As a child I was everything but a dedicated student and for a long time mathematics was probably the only subject I liked because I found it enjoyable. Things got better in high school but I was still not very interested in physics, which was taught in a very descriptive manner. I only started enjoying physics as I moved to the higher education system: the way physics was taught there meant I could enjoy again the recreational aspect of mathematics as well as a more ‘transcendental’ dimension, through the ability to comprehend much more of the surrounding world thanks to abstract mathematical theories. During my fourth year of higher education, I decided to start a Masters in quantum physics, due to my desire to do a PhD in quantum optics at the ENS, in Paris, where I had worked previously. But I first had to spend a few months abroad and I went to Boston University to work with Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner on a problem related to domain wall dynamics in statistical mechanics. I enjoyed working with Paul and Sid so much that I completely changed my plans and moved toward both theory and statistical physics.

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Dr Holger Waalkens

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:At school my favourite subject was mathematics. Still, I studied physics with the initial motivation to work on renewable energy resources. However, my passion for mathematics was stronger and I got interested in theoretical physics. I did my diploma thesis under the direction of Bruno Eckhardt in the areas of nonlinear dynamics and semiclassical quantum mechanics which still are my fields of research.

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Dr Sandro M Wimberger

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:Determination and coincidence! I had a very good teacher in grammar school (who is actually quite famous in Germany because of his former wife who was subject of a film titled Das Schreckliche Maedchen or The Nasty Girl). Mr Wenninger's stimulations, much beyond the curriculum, made me decide to study physics and dedicate my doctoral thesis to him. My former supervisor I met by accident on the corridor while on interview for an experimental position in Munich ... and I turned out to become a theorist.

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Dr Marija Zamaklar

Q:What led you into science and your chosen area of research?

A:I had a great physics teacher in primary school who initiated my interest in the subject. However, I became totally captivated with the subject after reading Hawking's ‘Brief History of Time’ when I was 11. I also wrote him a letter and the fact that I got an answer back was great inspiration. I was very proud of myself when, many years later, I managed to become a PhD student in his group in Cambridge.

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