AN Kamal
Department of Physics professor emeritus and former chair Abdul Naim (AN) Kamal has died at the age of 83.
Kamal was a University of Alberta professor from 1964 until his retirement in 1996. He served as Director of the Theoretical Physics Institute in 1979-80, as Chair of the department from 1980 to 1984, and as Acting Chair in 1988-89. In 1990-91, he was awarded the McCalla Professorship.
Kamal's illustrious career at the University of Alberta began with a letter. Looking ahead to his future, the then-graduate student at University of Liverpool asked a couple of postdoctoral fellows from Canada about opportunities at Canadian universities. They suggested he contact another Canadian who was at Liverpool then, a visiting professor from the University of Alberta named Harry Schiff. Kamal wrote to Schiff a couple of years later. In reply, Schiff offered him a postdoctoral fellowship.
"When Kamal arrived from Liverpool, everyone was impressed," recalls Mohsen Razavy, who was a newly hired assistant professor at the University of Alberta. "We thought we should hire him as a postdoc in the Theoretical Physics Institute." Kamal would soon join Razavy on faculty. "He did excellent work as a postdoc and they decided to keep him as an assistant professor. He was an excellent teacher."
Razavy remembers that Kamal had a large number of graduate students because of the popularity of Kamal's field of study, elementary particles. Kamal had written one of the earliest and most influential books about particle physics, Problems in Particle Physics (McGraw-Hill, 1966).
Luce Gauthier was one of Kamal's early graduate students, being supervised by him between 1970 and 1973. "When I started doing research with him, as a consequence of my valuation of his impressive work, I was afraid to disturb him in his thinking and did not dare to go to him very often to discuss my own project," she recalls. "He rapidly noticed this fact and told me I should come to see him once a week to discuss my work. This was exactly the attitude I needed from a supervisor!" Their in-person consultations were converted to consultations by letter when Kamal was on sabbatical. Gauthier, who is now retired after a career with Hydro Québec, recently donated that correspondence to the University of Alberta, along with other papers related to her work as a researcher here. "With him as a supervisor, I gained at the same time knowledge and self-confidence."
Current professor of theoretical particle physics Andrzej Prus-Czarnecki was Kamal's graduate student in later years. Prus-Czarnecki arrived as an unsupported student at Christmas 1989, and was fully accepted by the department a few months later. The department had only two professors working in his area of expertise, and one was about to go on sabbatical. The remaining professor, Kamal, would become Prus-Czarnecki's supervisor. They would go on to publish five papers together on heavy quark physics, "mostly the Charm quark, on which Kamal was a world leader," Prus-Czarnecki recalls. "He was a great supervisor. He was friendly and supportive, generous with his time." To this day, Prus-Czarnecki keeps a photo of wife, Weronika, which was taken in Kamal's back yard, pinned to the tack board above his office computer.
Helen Biltek, Department of Physics executive secretary from 1971 to 1992, remembers Kamal as an excellent administrator and team member. "I never felt that I was working for him. I felt like I was working with him." Staying in touch after their respective retirements, Biltek helped Kamal become a student-of creative writing. Biltek volunteered with the Strathcona Place Seniors Centre and knew of Kamal's interest in writing. After learning that Kamal had travelled to Saskatchewan to take a $300 writing course, she suggested that he take a course in Edmonton at the Seniors Centre. "He said, 'Oh, they'll never take me,'" Biltek recounts. Despite his reticence, Biltek arranged for Kamal's acceptance into the class, which was taught by Jack Bilsland, a retired English professor. As she remembers it, "[Kamal] joined the creative writing class and he was the star!"
Creative writing went from being theory to being practice. "He wrote a lot of short stories," says Prus-Czarnecki. "They were always very funny. He had akeen sense of observation."
Kamal also contributed a remembrance of his first days in Edmonton to Echoes In the Halls: An Unofficial History of the University of Alberta (University of Alberta Press, 1999). The story of his first letter inquiring about a job at the University of Alberta is included. He wrote: "I came to Edmonton for a two-year stint and stayed a lifetime."
Kamal's first day in Edmonton was on October 31, 1963. He passed away in Edmonton on April 22, 2019.