Abraham Pais

Abraham Pais
Abraham (Bram) Pais
Born	(1918-05-19)May 19, 1918 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Died	July 28, 2000(2000-07-28) (aged 82) Copenhagen, Denmark
Residence	Netherlands, United States, Denmark
Nationality	Dutch, American
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	Rockefeller University Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Niels Bohr Institute
Alma mater	University of Amsterdam, University of Utrecht
Doctoral advisor	Léon Rosenfeld
Known for	G-parity, treatment of SU(6) symmetry breaking
Notable awards	Andrew Gemant Award (1993)
Spouse	Jeanne Lila Lee Atwill Ida Nicolaisen

Rockefeller University

Abraham Pais (/peɪs/; May 19, 1918 – July 28, 2000) was a Dutch-born American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II. When the Nazis began the forced relocation of Dutch Jews, he went into hiding, but was later arrested and saved only by the end of the war. He then served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Pais wrote books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics. He was a physics professor at Rockefeller University until his retirement.

Pais was born in Amsterdam, the first child of middle-class Dutch Jewish parents. His father, Isaiah "Jacques" Pais, was the descendant of Sephardic Jews who migrated from Portugal to the Low Countries around the beginning of the 17th century. His mother, Kaatje "Cato" van Kleeff, was the daughter of an Ashkenazi diamond cutter. His parents met while studying to become elementary-school teachers. They both taught school until his mother quit when they married on December 2, 1916. His only sibling, Annie, was born on November 1, 1920. During Pais's childhood his father was an elementary schoolmaster, headmaster, and later the headmaster of the Sephardic Hebrew school.