Lives celebrated: Abdus Salam at Cambridge

During his very first year at Cambridge, Salam was satisfied with his mathematical knowledge, but not with his general knowledge. He, therefore, spent time in the library reading the history of civilisations. 

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch |
Source/Credit: The Nation | Pakistan
By Mujahid Kamran | November 21, 2010

Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s only Nobel Laureate, won the 1979 Nobel Prize for his contribution to unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces.

Before doing his PhD, Salam achieved the rare distinction of a double Tripos with first classes in both physics and mathematics. Salam had been admitted to St John’s College as a student of Tripos in mathematics. In an Urdu article written for the Government College magazine Ravi in 1989, Salam described aspects of his life at Cambridge: “I arrived at Cambridge in 1946 after having done M.A. from Government College, Lahore. In Cambridge classrooms, students sit in the same manner as namazis sit in a mosque before prayers. There is complete silence before the arrival of the lecturer….
My class fellows had come straight from schools and were younger to me. It took me two years to attain the same level of self-confidence and aspirations that they possessed. They had come from an environment where, before dispatching all good students to Cambridge, every school teacher would tell them that they were the sons of a nation that had produced Newton and that the knowledge of science and mathematics was their heritage - if they wished they too could become Newtons.”

Mathematics Tripos was a three-year course that had three part exams - Part I (called prelim), II and III. Salam cleared the prelim in first class. Most of his classmates got a third division even though there were students from places like Eton and Harrow among them. To Salam’s query about their miserable performance, his tutor Wordie replied: “We set the exams of prelims so hard so as to make a distinction between just those boys and the people who are really serious.”

During his very first year at Cambridge, Salam was satisfied with his mathematical knowledge, but not with his general knowledge. He, therefore, spent time in the library reading the history of civilisations.



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