“From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.”
-Abdus Salam
Abdus Salam was born in Jhang on 29 January 1926, to a family devoted to learning and piety. At a very early age, Salam established a repute for brilliance and academic excellence, securing the highest ever recorded marks in the Matriculation Examinations and receiving a scholarship to study at Cambridge. At Cambridge, he received the Smith’s Prize for the most outstanding pre-doctoral contribution to physics and later attained a PhD there in theoretical physics.
In 1951, he returned to Pakistan in hopes of establishing a research institute for aspiring physicians. However, he soon realized that the magnitude of the task was, at that time, too large to overcome. He moved back to Cambridge in 1954, and later established the International Centre for Theoretical Physics at Trieste, Italy in 1964, in order to provide support for physicists hailing from third world countries.
In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory and was the first Pakistani to ever receive a Nobel Prize. Salam contributed a great deal to the advancement of science and technology in his homeland, with many leaps in the field a direct consequence of his efforts.