Milan Kurepa

Who was Milan Kurepa?

Milan V. Kurepa was a renowned Serbian atomic physicist.

Kurepa was born on 1 May 1933 in town of Bačka Palanka, Vojvodina, Serbia. In 1956, he began his working at the Vinca Nuclear Institute in Belgrade. Kurepa graduated from the University of Belgrade Faculty of Mathematics under Aleksandar Milojević, and later electrical engineering in the United Kingdom, under J. D. Craggs. His thesis topic was slow electron scattering off atoms and molecules.

Kurepa then joined the University of Belgrade physics department as an assistant professor. He became a professor in 1981 and continued in that position until his retirement in 1998. Kurepa often worked at Universities abroad, including Germany and the UK. Kurepa's pedagogical work at the undergraduate and graduate levels was highly valued. He was a coauthor of 12 university and 4 high-school textbooks.

In 1964, Kurepa joined the newly founded Institute of Physics at the University of Belgrade as a research scientist. There, he started the Atomic Physics Laboratory. Due primarily to Kurepa's leadership, the Atomic Physics Laboratory gained an international reputation in the field of electron collisions with atoms or molecules.