From the Aug. 17 Physics World:
The Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, who many said should have shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2008 for his contribution to understanding the mechanism of quark mixing, died yesterday [Aug. 16] at the age of 75.
Cabibbo held many high-profile positions throughout his career including president of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). At the time of his death he was working at the University of Rome "La Sapienza", and was president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and chair of the scientific council at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP).
Only last week Cabibbo, together with Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan of the University of Texas at Austin, were awarded the ICTP's 2010 Dirac medal for their "fundamental contributions to the understanding of weak interactions and other aspects of theoretical physics." A friend or colleague of Cabibbo will now be invited to accept the award on his behalf when it is presented in November by Irina Bokova, the director general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The article goes on to explain Cabibbo's contributions to the understanding of the weak interaction in quarks, the mixing between different "flavors" of quarks and the development of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, which among other things predicted the existence of the top, bottom, and charm quarks. Many physicists feel he should have shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics with Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa; instead they shared the prize with theorist Yoichiro Nambu. Several US national laboratories -- SLAC, Fermilab, and Brookhaven -- also had connections to this Nobel Prize-winning work.
