Professor Claud Lovelace died Sept 7, 2012, following a long illness. Professor Lovelace was born in England on January 16, 1934. His family moved to South Africa in 1946. He was an exceptional student and taught himself General Relativity by age 16. He graduated from Capetown University in 1954. He moved back to England in 1958, where he studied under Abdus Salam at Imperial College. Although he did not complete his PhD, he later obtained a prestigious theory position at CERN. Lovelace was one of the pioneers of string theory, and was the first to recognize that it required 26 dimensions to make a consistent quantum theory. He moved to Rutgers in 1971, and remained here for the rest of his career. A study in 2009 ranked him as the 14th most influential physicist in the world for the period 1967-1973. He was fully devoted to physics, and worked toward finding a "theory of everything" until his death.

Rutgers greatly benefited from having Professor Lovelace as a faculty member, and will continue to benefit thanks to his generous gifts to Rutgers. Professor Lovelace become the first person to provide a match for an endowed chair in response to the challenge of an anonymous donor, who offered to fund half of 18 endowed chairs if the other half for each chair came from another donor. He designated that the chair should be in experimental condensed matter physics, which he felt had the most chance of making practical contributions to help humanity. In addition, his estate will provide for an endowed graduate fellowship, and a research fund for young faculty doing research in condensed matter physics. He also donated his body to the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and his collection of over 4000 classical music CD's to the Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Biographical sketch contributed by Ronald Ransome

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Last revised Sept 10, 2012
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