Nicholas Kurti

Nicholas Kurti, (14 May 1908 – 24 November 1998) was a Hungarian-born British physicist who lived in Oxford, UK, for most of his life.

Career Born in Budapest, Kurti went to high school at the Minta Gymnasium, but due to anti-Jewish laws he had to leave the country, gaining his master's degree at the Sorbonne in Paris. He obtained his doctorate in low-temperature physics in Berlin, working with Professor Franz Simon. He later became the society's Vice-President from 1965 to 1967.

Kurti became a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1947 and became Professor of Physics at Oxford in 1967, a post he held until his retirement in 1975.

Kurti's hobby was cooking, and he was an enthusiastic advocate of applying scientific knowledge to culinary problems, a field known today as gastrophysics. In 1969 he gave a talk at the Royal Institution titled "The physicist in the kitchen", in which he amazed the audience by using the recently invented microwave oven to make a "reverse Baked Alaska" — a Frozen Florida — hot liquor enclosed by a shell of frozen meringue. Over the years he organized several international workshops in Erice, Italy on "Molecular and Physical Gastronomy."