Gian-Luca Oppo

Lorenzo Narducci was my teacher, mentor and adviser during my stage at Drexel University in 1987-1989. He taught me an incredible amount of physics but also research ethics and research writing skills. His enthusiasm for physics was contagious. He constantly played down his contributions to research achievements while enthusiastically presenting the work of his collaborators. The reality was quite different. We, Lorenzo's co-workers, used to call ourselves the 'virgole' (literally the 'commas') such was the disparity of Lorenzo's work and intuition in final publications with respect to our contributions. Lorenzo gave me some of the best years in my research career. He is, and will remain, the light of all my professional work.

Gian-Luca Oppo
University of Strathclyde

Jeff Kimble

I knew Professor Lorenzo Narducci for most of my professional life and had the greatest respect for him as a scientist and as a man of utmost character and humanity. Of particular importance to me was the profound impact that Lorenzo had during the early stages of my career, both in substance and in spirit. I remember quite well sitting alone in a hotel lobby as a new assistant professor at a big OSA meeting. Lorenzo noticed and approached to encourage me in my quest to achieve optical bistability with atomic beams and to engage me in scientific discussions. Over the ensuing years, we interacted frequently, both as scientific colleagues and as friends. Such professional and personal recollections are shared by many throughout our community whose lives have been enriched in so many ways by Lorenzo. He was indeed a remakable man and scientist, and we are all the poorer for his passing.

H. Jeff Kimble
California Institute of Technology

Dieter Forster

It pains me to miss the Memorial Symposium in honor of my good friend Lorenzo Narducci. I'll attach a note I read to the Committee on Science and the Arts, the body of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia which has, since 1824, selected scientists for the Franklin medals.

Lorenzo Narducci died this summer, at the young age of 65. He had been a member of this committee for over twenty years, joining in the late 1970's. He ran the physics cluster for many years, and for two years he was the chair of the full committee. He guided the cases of many people whose names are now part of our illustrious history:

• Stephen Hawking, in 1981
• Roy Glauber who received last year's Nobel, in 1985
• Ted Hansch, also last year's Nobelist, in 1986
• Kadanoff, Scully, Haken the Bose-Einstein Triplet (Cornell, Ketterle, Wieman, in 2000, Nobel 2001), and several others

Lorenzo was usually ahead of his time, or at least of the Nobel committee.

Actually, my own membership here came about when, in 1981, I got a call from Lorenzo. He told me about this committee and its work, and asked me to join. Well, actually, he told me to join: Lorenzo could be pretty persuasive.

I have known Lorenzo much longer than that. We both found ourselves at the 1964 Les Houches Summer School, which was devoted to the newly invented laser. Willis Lamb was one of the lecturers, Bloembergen was there, and Roy Glauber -- in fact, Lorenzo, Urbaan Titulaer and I were drafted to edit Glauber's lecture notes. Les Houches is high up in the French Alps, and often Lorenzo and I went running together. That is, I was running to keep up while Lorenzo was walking. He was, you see, also in training as a speed walker, and later that year he became the Italian champion in that discipline. Lorenzo has always been one of those people who did what he did, with full involvement and full enthusiasm.

At Drexel University where he has been for about 30 years, Lorenzo was an illustrious research professor with over 200 papers to his name. In 1999 he won the Lamb award, the coveted award in Laser physics. He was, however, also an fabulous teacher who won a Lindbach award, and much praise from students and colleagues. (Let me quote one of his students: 'Dr. Narducci is the gold standard of professors. It should be a federal crime for anyone else to teach Quantum Mechanics at Drexel. He is beyond excellent.') He was furthermore a co-editor of the Physical Review A, the central paper in general physics. Lorenzo was, well, an active man.

For now many years Lorenzo suffered from kidney disease. Still he carried on, with all the energy he had, and all the enthusiasm about life, about physics, about his wonderful family. His life finally came to an end on July 20th. We will miss him.

Dieter Forster
Temple University

Pierre Meystre

Dear Frank,

I am very sorry to be unable to attend the conference in memory of your father. My son Pierre is graduating from high school today, and I thought that I needed to be present to celebrate this big step with him ... and also to try and figure out where the last 18 years have gone.

Frank, there are really no words to describe what your father has meant and still means to me. Lorenzo was of course a superb physicist, but to describe him just that way would give him short change indeed, because he was so much more than that.

He was an extraordinary human being, a Mensch. He did love physics with a passion, but more than that, he loved and cherished beauty, elegance, and the good things in life in all their forms. This of course included beautiful and elegant physics, but also beautiful and elegant food, beautiful and elegant wines, beautiful and elegant ideas, and of course, his beautiful and elegant family.

Lorenzo was intellectually ferociously honest, and he applied this (much too rare) quality to considerable advantage both in his research and in his work for Physical Review and for the physics community. He was also a very dear friend, another of those crazy European physics immigrants who are such a vibrant part of our community and enjoy the opportunities offered to them in the United States, but will never forget where the really good pasta, the really great cities, and the really fine wines come from...

Your father was tireless, and you could always count on him in times of need. He was of course enormously courageous, fighting his health problems with a dignity that one can only be in awe of. He will remain an amazing role model for all of us, and I know that I will never forget him.

I am sure that your father would not want us to feel sorry for him or for ourselves on this day when we should instead celebrate him, reminisce on all that he has done for us, and contemplate his impact on our physics and our lives. So I hope that this will turn into a great party, and again, I wish I could be there...

Best wishes to you, to your family, and to everybody at the meeting!

Pierre Meystre
The University of Arizona

Margaret Malloy

I worked with Lorenzo for 16 years in his capacity as Associate Editor for Physical Review A. He had incredibly high standards and encouraged these same high standards in all who worked with him. He referred to us as The "A" Team.

Lorenzo always made us smile. In one particular case, he was having a difficult time trying to find a referee for a paper. He told me: "Trying to find a referee for this manuscript is similar to trying to extract a tooth from the mouth of an elephant." He had the uncanny ability to reject a paper and receive a thank you note from the author. We all miss him dearly as a colleague and a friend.

Margaret Malloy
Editor, Physical Review A

Gordon Drake

As a long term colleague, I would like to record that Lorenzo is greatly missed, both as a friend, and as a key contributor to the editorial process at Physical Review A. He had served for more than 15 years as an Associate Editor with primary responsibility for papers in the areas of matter waves, lasers and quantum optics. His broad knowledge of the field and the strength of his own personal contributions made him outstandingly effective in this position, and earned him great respect from his colleagues. Most importantly, he was a genuine scholar dedicated to the pursuit of the highest standards of academic excellence in both research and publications, and he communicated these same high standards to those who worked with him. His enthusiasm and passion for the field provided a great example for us all to follow.

Gordon Drake
Editor, Physical Review A

Lorenzo Narducci: The Pure Quantum Man

Give us your poor, your teaming masses
Also Lorenzo for hard quantum classes
Oh there's Shakespeare and the Dirac equation
But our man is of Dante and Fermi persuasion
To Harvard comes roaming one bright spring day
This handsome young Roman bad dragons to slay
Mentored and tutored by Roy der Glauber
His physics was oh so sauber!
From quantum noise to the FEL
He did it all, he did it well:
There is great vacuum suppression
With Mel Lax's regression
Inversion without lasing
With both guns a blazing
CARL does work that's no surprise
From the wake of Narducci the physics did rise
From Phys. Rev. A to Optics Communications
He edits the word for future generations
From students superb to laboratory nerd
From hard headed theorists following the herd
Narducci is their hero with success hard wired
His work is beauteous, simply inspired
So congratulations Lorenzo on this Lamb Medal day
From Texas and the CSA

Marlan Scully
March 19, 1999

This poem was composed in celebration of Lorenzo's receiving the 1999 Willis E. Lamb Award for Laser Science and Quantum Optics.

Greg McIvor

While I only got small glimpses into Dr. Narducci's achievements as a physicist, I was fortunate enough to experience firsthand his love for teaching. I had Dr. Narducci as a professor for four of the major sequence physics courses (E&M 1 and 2 and Quantum 1 and 2), and through all of them he managed to convey difficult concepts in a beautifully logical and understandable way. More than any professor I had before or since, Dr. Narducci's classes always left me feeling like I actually understood what was being discussed, and that I had actually become a little bit smarter in that past hour. He was always willing to meet outside of class, and always offered encouragement through difficult homework and exams. As I go through grad school and talk to a variety of students with very different backgrounds, I see just how rare a professor like this is, and it reminds me just how lucky I was to have encountered one as great as Dr. Narducci.

I think many people would agree that Dr. Narducci possessed a passion for teaching which should be emulated by all educators. He was an inspirational professor, and truly a wonderful person. I consider myself privileged to have had him in my life.

One of my favorite quotes of Dr. Narducci (It reminds me of his fantastic sense of humor, and I can't help but laugh when I think of it):

"Some people say that money makes the world go around. They're wrong; it's angular momentum." - Dr. Narducci

Greg McIvor
Drexel Physics Class of 2004