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The NEEDS organising committee members are sorrowful to learn and announce that Antonis Verganelakis, one of the initiators and first promoters of the NEEDS conferences series, passed away on the 4th of October 2014.
For those who knew Prof Verganelakis, and for those of the new generation of participants in the NEEDS workshops who had not the chance of knowing him in person, we append here a brief remembrance of him written by Francesco Calogero.
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 Verganelakis 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”). It was therefore clearly desirable to find a way 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” participant an all-inclusive cost 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: for one thing 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 Eastern participants in the expectation that only a few would be permitted to come. But 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 land he had inherited in Crete. And it should be noted that the motivation of Antonis to engage in this enterprise 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”.
[Antonis also pursued this commitment by getting involved in Pugwash---the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs---and by organizing, essentially single-handedly---including the procurement of the necessary funds---the 1994 Annual Pugwash Conference, again at the OAC; the next Annual Pugwash Conference took place the following year in August in Hiroshima, on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the destruction of that city by a nuclear weapon; and later that year Pugwash shared with its founder, the physicist 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”. But this is another story…].
As it happened, our 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, as you know, 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. 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.
Francesco Calogero
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