Professor to give presentation at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt

Hassan Aref, Virginia Tech’s Reynolds Metals Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics and past dean of the college of engineering, is one of 20 speakers from around the world invited to present at the Einstein Symposium at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

The June Symposium has been organized to celebrate the declaration by UNESCO of 2005 as the World Year of Physics. The closed meeting will focus on the quest for a unified understanding of the laws of nature, a goal of Albert Einstein’s. Einstein wished to unify the laws of electricity and magnetism, discovered in the 19th Century, with the laws of gravity. Today, the quest for unification continues but on a broader scientific front.

In addition to Aref, the speaker panel includes three Nobel Laureates: Murray Gell-Man of the Santa Fe Institute, Gerardus Hooft of the University of Utr echt, Klaus von Klitzing of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Physics.

Aref’s talk is titled: “Point Vortices: From Models of Atoms to Patterns in Bose-Einstein Condensates.”