Remembering Miguel Virasoro

ICTP held a memorial session on 22 October in honour of former Director Miguel Virasoro, who passed away in July 2021. The session was held during the ceremony for the 2020 Dirac Medals; Virasoro shared that year's prize with Andre Neveu and Pierre Ramond.

Virasoro, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was well-known for his research in theoretical physics and mathematical physics. The memorial session brought together three of his closest collaborators and friends--Gabriele Veneziano, Giorgio Parisi and Daniele Amati--who shared their memories of a brilliant scientist whose interests crossed multiple disciplines, as well as his widow, Alejandra Figliola, who travelled from Argentina to attend the event.

Professor Figliola started the session by sharing personal aspects of her late husband, including that he was a victim of the brutal oppression of Argentina's military dictatorship in the 1970s. "Miguel was a political man, committed and capable of fighting for his ideas. In the turbulent 1970s he was dean in Buenos Aires. He suffered political violence; his life was in danger, and the arrival of the military dictatorship forced him to leave Argentina," she told the audience.

She said that in last month of his life, Virasoro could not speak, communicating only through writing but with great difficulty. "One of the last things he wrote to me was his will to go back to Trieste and meet his old friends."

Gabriele Veneziano titled his remembrances "Souvenirs of a Strong Interaction", but explained that the words had a double meaning: "We were working on the strong interaction, but here I mainly refer to the strong interaction I had with Miguel." Veneziano recalled how his and Virasoro's work lines crossed many times over the years, starting in 1967, when the two were at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Perhaps it was the fond memories of those early years that prompted Virasoro, a keen traveller, to write in a note to Veneziano last year, after learning of his Dirac award, that he hoped to visit the Weizmann Institute after coming to Trieste for the Dirac Ceremony.

Giorgio Parisi shared text of a letter he had received from Virasoro's son, Diego: "He was very proud and somewhat humbled by the achievement and proud to receive the Dirac medal," wrote Diego about his father, "He loved physics: it was not a job, but more a vocation. He worked up to the end....the only thing that took him away from research was directing ICTP."

Parisi, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, recalled the work he and Virasoro had done on spin glasses, acknowledging his late friend's important contributions to the field. "The papers I wrote with him are the some of the best papers I have written, they have been crucial in our understanding of spin glasses, and the book we wrote on the same topic was quoted in the citation for my Nobel Prize," he said, adding, "I am  very grateful for Miguel, I learned so many things from him, about physics, and about life, and also politics."

Daniele Amati noted Virasoro's wide interests, both scientific and nonscientific. "In his work here he always tried to enlarge the horizon of the scientific interests of ICTP," said Amati, "He followed Abdus Salam's feeling that science is a crucial way to help developing countries. It was not only to form technical theoreticians here, but people who had a correct reasoning and reality attitudes in science."