Abdus Salamਅਬਦੁਸ ਸਲਾਮ

Abdus Salam was born on 29 January 1926 in Jhang, in the Punjab Province of British India, now in Pakistan, into a Punjabi family professing the Ahmadiyya faith. His father, Chaudhary Muhammad Hussain, was a school teacher in Jhang. The family had deep roots in the town, and the boy who grew up there would become the most decorated scientist Punjab has produced.

A record-breaking schoolboy from Jhang

Salam's school record became local legend. At fourteen he scored the highest marks ever recorded in the matriculation examination of the University of the Punjab, and when he cycled home to Jhang the whole town turned out to welcome him. He studied at Government College, Lahore, taking his master's degree in mathematics in 1946 with record marks, after publishing as a student an elegant solution to a problem first studied by the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Cambridge, Lahore and Imperial College

A scholarship took him to St John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1949 with a Double First in mathematics and physics, won the Smith's Prize in 1950, and completed a doctorate whose thesis, Developments in Quantum Theory of Fields, won the Adams Prize. He returned to Lahore as a professor at Government College from 1951 to 1954 and chaired the mathematics department at the University of the Punjab, even introducing a course in quantum mechanics. But research facilities at home were thin, and in 1957 he took up a chair at Imperial College, London. There he built one of the world's leading theoretical physics groups. At thirty-three, in 1959, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the youngest people ever to receive the honour.

What is the electroweak theory he helped build?

The work that won the Nobel Prize answered a deceptively simple question: are the forces of nature really separate? Salam, working in the same direction as Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg, helped show that electromagnetism and the weak interaction, the force behind some kinds of radioactive decay, are two faces of a single electroweak force. The theory predicted a new phenomenon, the weak neutral current, which experiments later confirmed. In 1979 the three men shared the Nobel Prize in Physics, making Salam the first Pakistani Nobel laureate and the first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize in science. His other contributions include the Pati-Salam model of 1974, developed with Jogesh Pati, and work on supersymmetry and the Higgs mechanism.

Building science in Pakistan

Through his years in London and Trieste, Salam spent much of his energy building Pakistan's scientific institutions. He was scientific advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology from 1960 to 1974, founded the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, SUPARCO, in 1961 and served as its first director, and played a central role in the country's atomic energy programme. He is remembered as a founder and scientific father of theoretical physics in Pakistan, and generations of Pakistani physicists passed through the departments and programmes he created.

The ICTP and a worldwide classroom

Salam believed that scientific thought is the common heritage of humankind, and that poor countries lost their best minds when talented students had to emigrate for good to do research. In 1964 he founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, a place where physicists from the developing world could work at the highest level and still stay connected to home. He directed the centre until 1993, and after his death it was renamed the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. He also founded the Third World Academy of Sciences, linking researchers across the developing world.

Departure in 1974 and final years

In 1974, Pakistan's Parliament passed a constitutional amendment declaring members of the Ahmadiyya community, to which Salam belonged, to be non-Muslim. Salam left Pakistan in protest and resigned his advisory roles, though he kept his ties with the country and its scientists for the rest of his life. He died in Oxford on 21 November 1996, aged seventy, and his body was brought back to Pakistan for burial. The honours list tells the scale of the career: the Smith's Prize and Adams Prize at Cambridge, the Hughes Medal, the Royal Medal, the Copley Medal, and, above them all, the Nobel Prize that a schoolteacher's son from Jhang carried home to Punjab.