IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON has said it will rename its central library after the Nobel Prize-winning Pakistani scientist, the late Abdus Salam.
The university’s decision to recognise the theoretical physicist follows a report last year which focused on “undercelebrated people” from its past.
Salam, born in Punjab in present-day Pakistan in 1926, joined Imperial in 1957 and set up the theoretical physics department with the late professor Paul T Matthews.
He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize with two other scientists for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory.
“It is right that we do more” to celebrate the legacy of Salam who made “a tremendous contribution to Imperial,” university president Hugh Brady said.
He hoped the new Abdus Salam Library, which will be formally named in the next academic year, would inspire “many more people in the years to come.”
Imperial described the physicist as a “passionate promoter of science education in the developing world”, having founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 1964.
