30 January 2026
The Pugwash community is deeply saddened by the death of former Secretary General, Prof. Francesco Calogero. Francesco was a most distinguished and illustrious scientist, a figure of the highest standing in the international Mathematical-Physics community, as well as an intellectual deeply engaged in global affairs. Francesco was an extraordinary figure in the Pugwash movement and will be fondly remembered for his moral and intellectual clarity and a commitment to rational dialogue.
The experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 led Francesco to a life-long dedication to peace, arms control, and disarmament. Brought into the Pugwash movement through his friend and colleague, Edoardo Amaldi, Francesco first attended the 22nd Pugwash Conference in 1965 in Venice. After subsequently attending many dozens of Pugwash meetings, Francesco served as Secretary General between 1989–1997. During his tenure he had the honour of accepting the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Pugwash, jointly awarded in 1995 to Pugwash and to Joseph Rotblat. After 1997, Calogero returned to scientific research but continued to participate, frequently, in Pugwash meetings. He remained a member of the Pugwash Council and was an annual participant in the Italian ISODARCO courses helping to educate and train young professionals in the disarmament field (indeed, he joined the 65th ISODARCO from 10-17 January 2026).
Francesco served for the entirety of his career as a faculty member and subsequently as Professor Emeritus at the Department of Physics of “La Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy. The exceptional value of his scientific contributions was recognised at both national and international levels, most notably through two awards of the greatest distinction.
In 2019, he was jointly awarded by the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics, together with two distinguished foreign colleagues, the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics – one of the most prestigious honours in Mathematical Physics worldwide – “for his profound contributions to the field of exactly solvable models in statistical mechanics and many-body physics.”
He received the President of the Republic Prize 2019 from the Italian Accademia dei Lincei (one of the oldest learned societies in Europe, including Galilei, Fermi and Einstein as its members across four centuries of activity), “for exact solutions to many-body interaction problems, such as the one-dimensional quantum N-body problem with interaction inversely proportional to the square of the distance, and for having identified new families of integrable equations for many-body systems connected to the classical theory of special functions, subsequently demonstrating the fruitfulness of his methods through important works on partial differential equations; in this field, his contribution to the determination of classes of equations with solitonic solutions has been original and innovative, and continues to arouse interest and serve as a source of new problems.”
“I was very saddened by the news. With his passing, we have lost one of the most influential figures in the history of Pugwash. He worked hard and passionately to build bridges, foster dialogue channels and bring scientific knowledge and rationale to mitigate the risk posed by nuclear weapons, mainly during the transition out of the Cold War.
“Francesco was one of my main mentors when I joined Pugwash in 1998. Most of what I learned about its history, modus operandi, core values and goals grew out of long chats with him. Many times we would finish up discussing problems in physics since we were both interested and working on exactly solvable models in many-body physics. I had studied several of his models (mainly the Calogero-Moser-Sutherland one-dimensional models) during my PhD thesis in Bariloche. I admired him from the first time we met when I realized we shared the same academic and political passions.
“His straightforward style, integrity, intellectual honesty and critical thinking are at the heart of the way he dealt with those complex problems. And what made Pugwash unique. We will miss him dearly, but he will always be present.”
Dr. Karen Hallberg, Secretary General of Pugwash
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs 