Nicholas Kurti

Who was Nicholas Kurti?

Professor Nicholas Kurti FRS was a Hungarian-born physicist who lived in Oxford, UK, for most of his life. In his era, he was one of the leading experimental physicists.

Born in Budapest, he went to high school at the Minta Gymnasium, but due to anti-Jewish laws he had to leave the country, gaining his master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris. He obtained his doctorate in low-temperature physics in Berlin, working with Professor Franz Simon. However, when Adolf Hitler rose to power, both Simon and Kurti left Germany, joining the Clarendon Laboratory in the University of Oxford, England.

During World War II he worked on the Manhattan project, returning to Oxford in 1945. In 1956, Simon and Kurti built a laboratory experiment that reached a temperature of one microkelvin. This work attracted worldwide attention, and Kurti was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He later became the society's Vice-President from 1965 to 1967.

He became Professor of Physics at Oxford in 1967, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. He was also Visiting Professor at City College in New York, the University of California, Berkeley, and Amherst College in Massachusetts.