Antonis Verganelakis

Antonis Verganelakis

Antonis Verganelakis was a theoretical physicist, born in Chania, Crete, Greece, August 4, 1932. He passed away in Athens, October 4, 2014, after a long illness. He is survived by his beloved wife Maria and by their two children, Vassilis and Dimitris, both of them physicists.

Antonis was the main local organizer of the 1994 Annual Pugwash Conference: indeed, were it not for his personal commitment, that year there would not have been any Annual Pugwash Conference. He managed to organize it essentially single-handedly---including the procurement of the necessary funds---at the Orthodox Academy of Crete (OAC) in the small village of Kolymbari. That meeting was quite successful, in spite of its being held in the new premises of the OAC which were not yet quite completed.

I remember the somewhat schizophrenic treatment I---then serving as Secretary General of Pugwash---was subjected to during that Conference. On one side I was worried at the various potential organizational emergencies that generally emerge during such a meeting, and kept pressing Antonis to take care of them well in advance: “earlier, earlier”, say one day for the next. While he generally postponed the solution to the very last minute, and then always managed to eliminate the difficulty so that nobody but me was ever aware of any problem. At the same time a Finnish subgroup of participants at the Conference was meeting to organize the Annual Pugwash Conference due to take place in Finland two years later, and several times they came pressing me to decide on specific, minute organizational details of that future Conference; to which I replied that we could/should take care of them “later, later"… As it happened the next Annual Pugwash Conference took place the following year in August in Hiroshima, on the occasion of the 50^th Anniversary of the destruction of that city by a nuclear weapon; and later that year Pugwash shared with Joseph Rotblat the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms”. The organization of the subsequent Annual Conference in Finland was then somewhat influenced and much facilitated by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Pugwash…

Much earlier Antonis Verganelakis had also played a crucial role to initiate the series of Workshops NEEDS (Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Dynamical Systems), and to organized the first few of them. At the end of the 1970’s major developments had occurred and were occurring in the field of “integrable” nonlinear evolution equations and dynamical systems; although the first scientific breakthrough in that field had been done by an American group, a major role in its subsequent development was being played by scientists living in the Soviet Union and also in other countries to the East of the boundary (“Iron Curtain”) characterizing the political separation then prevailing in the world (“the Cold War”). I therefore thought that it would be desirable to bring together the significant communities of scientists working on these topics in “the West” and “the East”. At the time for most scientists in “the East” it was not absolutely forbidden to take part in scientific meetings in “the West”, provided all their expenses in “hard currency” would be covered by the inviting party: hence essentially all expenses except the main travel costs, which could be covered by their institutions in local currency using Aeroflot or other Eastern airlines. On the other hand at the time the main source of funding for international scientific meetings was the NATO Science Program, which---while generally funding purely scientific meetings with no direct military relevance---might be hesitant to fund a meeting the main purpose of which would have been to also host participants from the other side of the Iron Curtain; and in any case those scientists would not have been permitted by their institutions to participate in a NATO-sponsored meeting. So, the hope to organize such a meeting of “Eastern” and “Western” minds appeared doomed. But Antonis invented a way to bypass this difficulty. The trick was to organize a meeting in a location both very attractive (touristically) and very low-cost---and he found it: the Orthodox Academy of Crete (OAC) in Kolymbari, a small village in Crete. To then invite a roster of participants from both sides of the Iron Curtain which guaranteed an excellent scientific level and the opportunity to meet outstanding scientists; and to charge the “Western” participants attracted by these circumstances an all-inclusive fee which, while being quite reasonable, left a margin which could be used to cover the local costs for the “Eastern” participants. The organization of such an operation entailed a gamble: the invitation to the “Eastern” scientists had to entail a commitment to cover all their local costs (otherwise there would be no chance that they be permitted by their institutions to accept), and moreover one had to invite a large number of them in the expectation that only a few would be permitted to come. This entailed the risk that a very large number of “Eastern” scientists be allowed to come; an excellent success scientifically, but then how to cover their local expenses (since one could not expect the number of Western participants to be huge)? When I raised this concern with Antonis, he---who was by no means a wealthy person---replied that if need be he would sell a piece of the land he had inherited in Crete; the same attitude he also took later, when taking the commitment to organize the 1994 Annual Pugwash Conference at the OAC in Crete. And it should be noted that the motivation of Antonis to get engaged in organizing the NEEDS Workshops was not because of his personal scientific interests (his field was phenomenological elementary particle physics, quite far from mathematical physics and the outstanding findings then emerging in nonlinear integrability). His intervention was consistent with his remarkable capability to come up with a working solution when a friend confided to him his problems. But it was mainly motivated by his general commitment to foster scientific relations impeded by political circumstances, backed by a second thought: that these relationships, besides promoting good science, could also contribute, over time, to overcome ideological and political divides, i. e. promote the good cause of “world peace”.

As it happened, that gamble was successful, and the first of the NEEDS Workshops took place at the OAC in 1980, with the participation of eminent “Western” and “Eastern” scientists. It initiated a series of analogous meetings, of which 5 others took place at the OAC (1983, 1989, 1997, 1999, 2012), 4 took place in Italy (3 in Gallipoli: 1985, 1991, 1993; 1 in Isola Rossa, Sardinia: 2009), 1 in France (Baraluc-les-Bains: 1987), 2 in Russia (Dubna: 1990, 1992), 1 in the USA (Los Alamos, 1994), 2 in Great Britain (Leeds: 1998; Cambridge: 2001), 1 in Turkey (Gokova: 2000), and 2 in Spain (Cadiz: 2002; L’Ametlla de Mar: 2007). The next one will take place in Italy (S. Margherita de Pula near Cagliari, Sardinia: May 24-31, 2015).

It is well known that this series of Workshops played a significant role in fostering the development of this sector of science. The first few meetings also contributed to the understanding---across ideological and political divides, based on the universality of science---that has constituted the original root of the Pugwash enterprise. It is therefore appropriate that we pay tribute to the generosity and cleverness of Antonis Verganelakis, without whose input this series of Workshops would not have materialized. Antonis Verganelakis, who then became a Pugwashite and came to the help of Pugwash at a critical turn of its history.

Francesco Calogero