Abdus Salam

Mohammad Abdus Salam (29 January 1926 – 21 November 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist.

Abdus Salam was born on 29 January 1926 in the Punjab Province of British India (now in Pakistan) into a Punjabi Rajput family professing Ahmadi Islam.

His grandfather, Gul Muhammad, was a religious scholar as well as a physician, and his father Choudhary Muhammad Hussain was a minor educational official and a teacher.

Abdus Salam's father was stationed in a poor farming district in Jhang, where Abdus Salam spent his early years.

His birthplace is often given as Jhang, but he was, in fact, born in Saktokdas in the Sahiwal District, where his mother Hajira Begum's family was living, and where she returned to give birth, as was customary with the first child.

His sister was also born in Saktokdas, whereas his six brothers were all born in Jhang.

The name Choudhary Muhammad Hussain gave his son was Abd al-Salam which means "Servant of God".

Abd means servant and Salam is one of the 99 names of God in the Qur'an.

In English, his name is usually transliterated as Abdus Salam, which should be understood as a single given name.

His father followed the custom of not giving a surname.

Later in his life he added Mohammad to his name.

Salam very early established a reputation throughout Punjab for outstanding brilliance and academic achievement.

At age 14, Salam scored the highest marks ever recorded for the entrance examination at the Punjab University.

He won a full scholarship to the Government College University of Lahore.

Salam was a versatile scholar, interested in Urdu and English literature in which he excelled.

After a month in Lahore, he went to Bombay to study.

As a fourth-year student there, he published his work on Srinivasa Ramanujan's problems in mathematics, and took his B.A. in Mathematics in 1944.

His father wanted him to join the Indian Civil Service (ICS).

In those days, the ICS was the highest aspiration for young university graduates and civil servants occupied a respected place in civil society.

Respecting his father's wish, Salam tried for the Indian Railways but did not qualify for the service as he failed the medical optical tests.

The results further concluded that Salam failed a mechanical test required by railway engineers to gain a commission in the Railways, and that he was too young to compete for the job.

Therefore, the Railways rejected Salam's job application.

While in Lahore, Salam went on to attend the graduate school of Government College University.

In 1947, he came back to Lahore.

But he soon picked up Mathematics as his concentration.

Salam's mentor and tutors wanted him to become an English teacher, but Salam decided to stick with Mathematics.

Salam was scientific advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology in Pakistan from 1960 to 1974, a position from which he played a major and influential role in the development of the country's science infrastructure.

Salam contributed to numerous developments in theoretical and particle physics in Pakistan.

He was the founding director of the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), and responsible for the establishment of the Theoretical Physics Group (TPG).

For this, he is viewed as the "scientific father" of this program.

In 1974, Abdus Salam departed from his country in protest after the Parliament of Pakistan passed unanimously a parliamentary bill declaring members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, to which Salam belonged, non-Muslim.

He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory.

He was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize, after Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

In 1998, following the country's Chagai-I nuclear tests, the Government of Pakistan issued a commemorative stamp, as a part of "Scientists of Pakistan", to honour the services of Salam.

Salam's notable achievements include the Pati–Salam model, magnetic photon, vector meson, Grand Unified Theory, work on supersymmetry and, most importantly, electroweak theory, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Salam made a major contribution in quantum field theory and in the advancement of Mathematics at Imperial College London.

With his student, Riazuddin, Salam made important contributions to the modern theory on neutrinos, neutron stars and black holes, as well as the work on modernising quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

As a teacher and science promoter, Salam is remembered as a founder and scientific father of mathematical and theoretical physics in Pakistan during his term as the chief scientific advisor to the president.

Salam heavily contributed to the rise of Pakistani physics within the global physics community.

Up until shortly before his death, Salam continued to contribute to physics, and to advocate for the development of science in third-world countries.