Stephen Gasiorowicz was born on May 10, 1928, into a Jewish family in
Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Between 1920 and 1939 Danzig was a semi-autonomous city-state populated to a large extent by ethnic Germans. Stephen’s father was a merchant. With the rise to power of Hitler and Nazis in Germany in 1933 persecution of non-Germans in Danzig increased, and Gasiorowicz’s family had to move to Warsaw. On September 1, 1939, the
Second World War began with the invasion of Poland by Germany. The Gasiorowiczes had to flee immediately; the only open route was to the East of Poland, to
Lemberg (currently
Lviv, Ukraine). A few dozen miles before Lviv the Gasiorowiczes were met by a detachment of the Soviet Army, which occupied the eastern part of Poland. Stephen Gasiorowicz’s journey to freedom started in 1939 in occupied Poland ended in 1946 in the United States. It lasted for seven years; through the USSR, Romania, Turkey, Iraq, and India. It was not until he was in India (at that time controlled by Britain; the Polish Government in exile was its ally), that the Gasiorowiczes obtained residence permits. He got his education there; first in a Catholic school and then in a Liceum. In 1946 the Gasiorowiczes were notified that their application for immigration to the U.S., which they filed before the
Second World War, was finally approved. The same year Stephen Gasiorowicz sailed from Calcutta, India to San Francisco, California. He was admitted to UCLA as a physics major; he received his BA degree in 1948 and PhD in 1952. His PhD adviser was
Robert Finkelstein, and the topic of his PhD thesis was
A non-linear model for the composite π-mesons. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s Stephen Gasiorowicz acquired a reputation as an excellent lecturer, and was sought after as a visiting professor by major research centers, such as
NORDITA (Denmark),
DESY (Germany), the
University of Tokyo. Gasiorowicz’s legacy in physics education spread worldwide. Generations of physics students studied using the textbooks written by Gasiorowicz, which include
Elementary Particle Physics,
Quantum Physics, and
Physics for Scientists and Engineers. He was a PhD adviser to several prominent physicists, including
Stanley Brodsky of
SLAC and
William A. Bardeen of the
Fermilab. ==Selected books==