Sandu Popescu

Sandu Popescu, born in Oradea, Romania, is Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol, and also a visiting Professor in the Mathematics Institute at Berkeley. Between 1996 and 2008 he was also associated with Hewlett-Packard. He is one of the world's foremost experts in the field of Quantum Information theory, and also in the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Sandu Popescu is the world's first physicist who managed a particle teleportation using an optical technology. This memorable event took place on July 4, 1997, in the Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Bristol, England.

His research interests center on fundamental aspects of quantum physics, in particular gaining a better understanding of the nature of quantum behavior. A major focus of his research has been quantum nonlocality. This led him to establish some of the central concepts in the area of quantum information and computation. Dr. Popescu has also worked on many other aspects of quantum theory, ranging from the very fundamental, to designing practical experiments (such as the first quantum teleportation experiment) to patentable commercial applications. He was awarded the Adams Prize 2000 for contributions to quantum information.

The Hero

On April 16, 2007, a man killed 33 people and wounded 28 in the bloodiest incident of its kind; it took place at the Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia. Virginia Tech reported shootings on two sides of the 2,600-acre campus, the first at about 7:15 a.m. at a co-ed residential hall called West Ambler Johnston, and resuming about two hours later at Norris Hall, an engineering building. The carnage ended Monday with the gunman shooting himself in the face.


The Romanian professor Liviu Librescu, the 75-year-old Holocaust survivor blocked the assailant from entering his classroom and told his students to flee. He was killed on Holocaust Memorial Day, when he leaped between the gunner and his students. “All the students lived because of him”, a Virginia Tech student said. "He should be recognized as a hero", Virginia Tech graduate student Philip Huffstetler said. "We should be in such great debt to his family for the rest of our lives". "He is the reason that the killer could not get inside and shoot more people", said another Virginia Tech student. "Obviously, he is a hero".

Liviu Librescu had known hardship since childhood. When Romania joined forces with Nazi Germany in World War II, he was first interned in a labor camp in Transnistria and then deported along with his family and thousands of other Jews to a central ghetto in the city of Focşani. As a successful engineer under the postwar Communist government, Librescu found work at Romania's aerospace agency. But his career was stymied in the 1970s because he refused to swear allegiance to the regime, and he was later fired when he requested permission to move to Israel. After years of government refusal, according to his son, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin personally intervened to get the family an emigration permit, so they moved to Israel in 1978. Librescu left Israel for Virginia in 1985 for a sabbatical year, but eventually made the move permanent. Librescu taught engineering and mechanics, and his work had been published more times than that of any professor in Virginia Tech history. He was described by his colleagues as a "true gentleman".

Ioan Cantacuzino

Ioan C. Cantacuzino or Ion Cantacuzino (November 25, 1863 - January 14, 1934) was a renowned Romanian physician and bacteriologist, a professor at the Romanian School of Medicine and Pharmacy and a member of the Romanian Academy. He was the founder of the fields of microbiology and experimental medicine in Romania, and creator of the "Ioan Cantacuzino" Institute.


Born in Bucharest as a member of the Cantacuzino family, he graduated from the University of Paris' Faculty of Sciences and Faculty of Medicine and worked at several hospitals in Paris, obtaining his doctorate in 1894, with the thesis "Recherches sur le mode de destruction du vibrion cholérique dans l'organisme". Later in the same year, he began his academic career as a deputy professor at the University of Iaşi, and returned to Paris after two years to serve on the staff of the Pasteur Institute, where he worked under the direction of Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov.

His view of the life phenomena was a materialistic view. He was against finalism and a fervent adherent of the biological determinism, while being a declared Darwinian. In 1901, Cantacuzino was assigned a teaching position in Bucharest, where he became a major influence on a generation of scientists. His discoveries were relevant in the treatment of cholera, epidemic typhus, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever. As a disciple of Mechnikov, he devoted part of his research to expanding on the latter's field of interest (phagocytes, the body's means of defence against pathogens, as well as the issue of immunity and invertebrates). He invented the notion of contact immunity, the anti-choleric vaccine (the Cantacuzino method) and discovered the agglutination of microbes (the Cantacuzino phenomenon).


During the Second Balkan War, Cantacuzino was appointed head of the staff combatting the cholera epidemic in the ranks of the Romanian Army stationed in Dobruja; he was assigned to the same position during the Romanian campaign in World War I, in the fight against typhus. He founded and led the scientific magazines Revista Ştiinţelor Medicale and Archives roumaines de pathologie expérimentale, and regularly contributed to the literary magazine Viaţa Românească (replacing Paul Bujor on the editorial board). A collaborator of Constantin Stere, he was noted as a Poporanist disciple of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea.

Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade (March 13 1907 – April 22, 1986), Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them. In academia, the Eternal Return has become one of the most widely accepted ways of understanding the purpose of myth and ritual.


Mircea Eliade began his life in Bucharest. While still studying in the lycée he wrote numerous articles in a popular vein on entomology, the history of alchemy, Orientalism, the history of religions, impressions of his travels, stories, and literary criticism. In 1925 he entered the University of Bucharest, where he pursued the study of Renaissance philosophy. Thus began a life-long preoccupation with the great creative epochs in Western history and with the puzzle of human, especially literary, creativity itself. Eliade had seen, for example, how the Rumanian poets, writers, and historians he admired had drawn material and inspiration from folk sources, and he was fascinated to see an analogous process at work in the Italian Renaissance.

In 1928, while in Rome to research his degree thesis on Italian Philosophy, from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno, Eliade wrote to Professor Surendranath Dasgupta expressing a desire to study under his direction at the University of Calcutta - which he did, thanks to a scholarship offered him by the Maharajah Manindra Chandra Mandy of Kassimbazar. Eliade's stay in India lasted three years. In 1933 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on yoga, later published in French under the title Yoga: Essai sur les origines de le mystique indienne (1936), and began teaching at the University of Bucharest that same year.


Eliade by Marcel Janco
Shortly after his return from India, in the midst of a busy schedule that included university teaching and many commitments to write and lecture, Eliade's novel, Maitreyi, was released to great critical and popular acclaim. Born into a tradition which saw no incompatibility between scientific and literary occupations, Eliade, the historian of religions, continued to produce novels, stories, essays, and a travel book. Today, especially in Romania and Germany, he is known primarily as a writer of fiction; and his popularity continues to grow as more and more of his works appear in translation.

During World War II Eliade served as cultural attaché to the Romanian legations in London and Lisbon. After the war he elected to remain in exile in Paris where he could complete work on a number of manuscripts which had taken shape during the war years, notably Patterns in Comparative Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return, both of which came to print in 1949. The years 1951 to 1955 saw the publication of several more volumes for which Eliade is well known: Shamanism, Images and Symbols, Yoga, The Forge and the Crucible, and The Forbidden Forest. Many regard the last title as his most important work of fiction.


Eliade travelled to the United States to deliver the 1956 Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, and a year later he was offered the post of professor and chairman of the History of Religions Department and professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the university. Almost 30 years later, he was professor emeritus at this same institution with the title Sewell Avery Distinguished Service Professor.

Eliade's scholarly output continued unabated. Volume I of A History of Religious Ideas appeared in 1974, and three of its four projected volumes had been published by 1985. A History of Religious Ideas marked something of a departure from his previous theoretical work. As in his sourcebook, From Primitives to Zen, Eliade presented the "creative moments" of the world's religious traditions in more or less chronological order, treating them in a way one might call more historical and less thematic. In addition to his scholarly writing, Eliade served as editor-in-chief of a massive encyclopedia of religion until his death in 1986.

His literary works belong to the fantasy and autobiographical genre; the best known are the novels Maitreyi (La Nuit Bengali or Bengal Nights), Noaptea de Sânziene (The Forbidden Forest) and his Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent, the novellas Domnişoara Christina (Miss Christina) and Tinereţe fără tinereţe (Youth Without Youth), and the short stories Secretul doctorului Honigberger (The Secret of Dr. Honigberger) and La Ţigănci (With the Gypsy Girls). Remarkable for his vast erudition, Eliade had fluent command of five languages (Romanian, French, German, Italian, and English) and a reading knowledge of three others (Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit). He was elected postmortem member of the Romanian Academy.