Gabor J. Kalman (December 12, 1929 – December 10, 2022) was a Hungarian-American physicist, academic, and author. He was a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at Boston College. Kalman lead research focused on strongly coupled Coulomb systems, such as plasmas, charged particle layered systems, bilayers, and fluctuation–dissipation theorems, along with other aspects of plasma physics. He has also done extensive work in relativistic many particle systems, through works on electron–positron plasmas, particle systems with scalar fields and astrophysical many-body systems. He was the principal creator of the research community around the conference series Strongly Coupled Coulomb Systems (SCCS) and served as editor to two books, entitled Strongly Coupled Plasmas, and Strongly Coupled Coulomb Systems. Kalman was an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of New York Academy of Sciences, of the American Physical Society, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Education Kalman was born and educated in Hungary, where he received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University in Budapest in 1952. After graduation, he joined the then newly formed Central Research Institute for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He worked as Research Physicist, and from 1955 as Senior Research Physicist in the Department of Atomic Physics. He emigrated to Israel in 1956 and obtained a D.Sc. degree under the supervision of David Bohm and Nathan Rosen from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
Career Kalman's scientific career started in the Central Research Institute for Physics in Budapest, Hungary, in 1952, where he worked under the supervision of Karoly Simonyi in a group studying thermonuclear fusion. After emigrating to Israel in 1956, Kalman worked at the Technion in Haifa as lecturer, promoted to associate professor in 1961. In the same year, Kalman obtained and accepted an invitation to join the Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas, Universite de Paris, in Orsay, France. There, in 1962, he received an appointment to the position of Professeur Associé (equivalent to Full Professor) and had the responsibility of organizing a theoretical plasma physics group at the laboratory directed by Jean-Loup Delcroix. In 1965 he was appointed Directeur de Recherche at the C.N.R.S. Following this appointment, he received a visiting fellowship to the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, at the University of Colorado from 1965 to 1966. While at the University of Colorado, in 1966 he accepted a visiting professorship at Brandeis University, and he decided to settle in the United States and resigned from his position in France. His association with Brandeis lasted through 1969. During the same period, he worked intermittently for the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, holding the position of expert. Since 1970, he has been on the faculty of Boston College as research professor and received the title distinguished research professor in 1998, a position that he held until becoming professor emeritus in 2019. Between 1973 and 1978, he also held an honorary position and lectured on plasma astrophysics at the Center of Astrophysics, Harvard University. Kalman held various visiting appointments since 1970. He served as a visiting scientist at Observatoire de Paris in 1973 and 1974, and at Groupe de Recherches Ionospheriques du CNRS in 1974. At the University of Oxford, he held appointment as a senior visiting scientist in 1975. He was appointed a Professeur d'Echange at Universite de Paris and Observatoire de Paris in 1976, served as research leader at International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste in 1981 and 1984, and spent a semester as a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego in 1995. He lately provided advisory services to the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office, while continuing his collaboration with the Wigner Research Centre Group in Budapest.
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