Symmetry

The organising committee of the Symmetry Festival 2019 regrets to announce a shift of conducting this Festival from 2019 to 2020.

The organising committee sincerely apologizes for the postponement of the Festival.

ISA will announce the place and the precise dates of the Symmetry Festival 2020 soon!

Advisory member of ISA, Leon Max Lederman (96)  passed away on 3 October, 2018.

He used to be a member of ISA since its foundation. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982 (shared), for the research on quarks and leptons, and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 (shared),” for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino“. He was awarded (2012) the Vannevar Bush Award “for his extraordinary contributions to understanding the basic forces and particles of nature”.

I met him in Washington, D.C. (1983), and beyond his deep knowledge in (and outside) physics, I admired his smart personality. In the recent decades (1979-), he was director, and spiritus rector for long, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois up to his formal retirement, although he has not closed his contacts with that institution until his health allowed.

His distinguished interest in the role that symmetries play in particle physics was a leading principle of his discoveries, experimental methods, and can be traced in his writings. The most outstanding among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. His most popular book, The God Particle, brought him publicity even among non-physicists, where, among others, he explained the relationship between spontaneous symmetry breaking and the mysterious Higgs boson. That book explains many secrets of symmetries in contemporary particle physics for laymen in physics. This made him so much acknowledged by many members of the Symmetry Association. ISA keeps his memory.

ISA is glad to announce the Symmetry Festival 2019 to be held at the
ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany
24-28 July 2019

Union Mills, Indiana, June 1, 1943 – New York, October 18, 2017

John Hiigli used to be an active member of the Executive Board of ISA. He was a regular participant of the Symmetry Festivals since the first in 2003. His artworks can be found in many countries around the world, he was a regular contributor to the exhibitions of ISA, sometimes he presented individual exhibitions of his two- and three-dimensional works at the same city and time where Symmetry Festivals were organized, read lectures on the mathematical and educational issues at the conferences, published several times in the journal Symmetry: Culture and Science, and he organized worldwide children drawing exhibitions at the Jardin Gallery (and preschool, New York) run together with his wife, Dominique. He was always a co-operative person, rare in this sense among artists, who often created common artworks with his colleagues. He kept touch with his colleagues and friends, lived an active, creative life until his last period.

He joined the vernissage of the last exhibition of his works organized in his life, in the Saxon Gallery, Budapest, from his bed via the internet on 13 October. The exhibition can be visited by the end of November. He left us full with unaccomplished plans.

Many members of ISA are proud of his friendship. All who knew him liked his smart and kind personality. His quiet and wise words, his modest smile remain in our remembrance forever.

ISA honorary member, Reiko Kuroda paid a visit in the Mathematical Museum, at the R. Eötvös University, Budapest 13 September evening. She had a one and a half hour informal conversation with the members of the Budapest Symmetry Circle and the visitors of the MathMuseum’s regular Wednesday evening meeting. She told about her recent results, in particular the identification of the gene, and the nitrogenous base sequence of that, responsible for the chirality of animal organs.

Then, she met, among others, the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences next day.