Marcos Moshinsky, professor of theoretical physics and researcher at the Physics Institute of the Autonomous National University of Mexico, has made important contributions to the study of the symmetry of the basic laws of nature which have aided a greater understanding of the quantum physics which govern the behaviour of elemental particles.
Moshinsky belongs to a family of Jewish emigrants from the Ukraine, in whose capital, Kiev, he was born on the 20th April 1921. He has lived in Mexico, where he received his entire elementary and higher education and has spent almost all his professional life, from the age of three. After graduating in physics from the Autonomous National University, he moved to the United States in the late Forties to work at the University of Princeton under the guidance of Eugene P. Wigner, the Nobel Prize-winner for Physics. Wigner tutored his doctorate thesis (1949), which dealt with certain relativist equations with special contour conditions which simulate the interaction between particles. The techniques devised by Moshinsky in his thesis were to be widely used by himself and by other researchers in later years.
His scientific work concentrated from the beginning on the fields of theoretical nuclear physics and mathematical physics. His work began in the Fifties with a theoretical scheme for nuclear reactions, as well as studies of the structure of atomic nuclei. In particular, he introduced the concept of transformation parenthesis for harmonic oscillator functions, which, together with the tables drawn up in cooperation with T. Brody, considerable simplified the calculations in nucleus layer models, which has become an essential technique for everyone interested in the study of nuclear structure. These studies appeared in book form ("Tablas de paréntesis de transformación", Mexico 1960; 2nd edition, Gordon & Breach 1967), which is now a classic of physics research.
In 1954 he moved to Paris with a grant from the CNRS. Later, the award of a fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (1959), would mean an improvement in his economic situation, which was finally solved by his entry to the higher teaching grades at the Autonomous National University of Mexico. In 1962, he was appointed president of the Academy of Scientific Research, a post he held until 1967, and from then until 1969 he occupied the chair of the Mexican Physics Society.
In the Sixties, Moshinsky´s interest began to centre upon the concept of hidden symmetry in problems of quantum mechanics. In the harmonic oscillator problem this symmetry is related to the unitary group, whose structure and application to many body problems are resumed in two of his books: "Group theory and the many body problem" and "The harmonic oscillator in modern physics: from atoms to quarks", which has been translated into Russian.
In the Seventies, he principally analyzed two types of problems. The first of these was related to canonic transformations in classical mechanics and their representation in quantum mechanics. The second was the problem of collective movements in the nucleus, both from the macroscopic viewpoint, in the analysis with group theory of the Bohr-Mottelson model and of interacting bosons, and in the microscopic aspect, in what is known as the symplectic nucleus model. his interests in recent years have centred on the structure of material in strong magnetic fields, going from the solid state to elemental particles. He is also working on relativist symplectic models for quarks in elemental particles.
As well as participating in the editing of various international scientific journals, Moshinsky has published four books, two hundred technical publications and more than two hundred and fifty articles of journalism dealing with scientific information and education and the social impact of science.