QCD

Francisco José Ynduráin (1940-2008) died on 6/6/2008. He was one of my professors at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He taught, among other things, "Advanced Quantum Mechanics," one of the courses I took during my fourth year. He wrote some fun, high-quality popular science/physics books (unfortunately they haven't seen translation into English) which I enjoyed on the side. His dry-witted, sarcastic, no-nonsense classes agreed well with me, which was more I can say for some of the other courses I slogged through at the time.

Four of his books stand on the shelf before me. He signed two of them (a request I delicately timed until after I'd found out I had passed his course). The signature is dated 6/27/2002, six years ago almost to the day--though it seems more like a lifetime away now.

His major research contributions were in the field of QCD. Here's an advanced textbook on the subject he wrote, now a standard reference. And here's a link to 53 of his research papers, available online.

There's an entry on him at the Spanish Wiki, and here's his obituary, as written by two of his friends and fellow researchers, in the Spanish newspaper El Pais.