Luciano Fonda

Luciano Fonda (12 December 1931 – 21 July 1998) was an Italian theoretical physicist, author of a hundred of scientific publications, including a book on quantum symmetries. His research activity covered several areas, from nuclear and subnuclear physics to condensed state physics.

Biography

Born in Pula (then part of Italy, now Croatia), the events of the war brought his family to Trieste in December 1943. He completed his high school and college studies at the local Dante Alighieri school, before graduating in Physics summa cum laude at the University of Trieste in July 1955.

After becoming a Theoretical Physics assistant at the University of Trieste, he travelled to the United States of America with a Fulbright Program grant in 1958 to take the position of Research Associate at the Indiana University Bloomington. In 1959 Robert Oppenheimer invited him to become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

In November 1960 he won an Italian public competition to become a full professor of Theoretical Physics and returned to Italy in 1961, first to work at the University of Palermo and then at the University of Parma. In November 1963 he moved to the University of Trieste definitively.