Abdus Salam

Who is Abdus Salam?

Mohammad Abdus Salam was a theoretical physicist and the first Pakistani and first Muslim to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. Born in Jhang in 1926, he showed early brilliance and went on to study at Government College Lahore and then Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate. His most celebrated achievement was the electroweak unification theory, which showed that the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are aspects of a single interaction; for this he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. A passionate advocate for science in the developing world, he founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, in 1964, giving scientists from poorer nations access to research. He also helped establish Pakistan's early space and atomic research institutions. He died in Oxford in 1996.

Sources: Nobel Prize in Physics 1979, official citation (nobelprize.org) · Gordon Fraser, 'Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam — The First Muslim Nobel Scientist' (Oxford University Press, 2008)