Felix Weinberg (1928–2012)

Felix Jiří Weinberg was born to a Jewish family in Ústí nad Labem, Czechoslovakia. His parents were Nelly and Viktor Weinberg. His idyllic childhood was brutally interrupted when Nazi Germany invaded his country in World War II. Felix was deported at age 14 to the concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt) in 1942, from there to Auschwitz in 1943, and finally to Buchenwald. He survived to be liberated in April 1945. His mother and brother died in the camps, but Weinberg was reunited with his father in England in August 1945. He took his first degree from the University of London as an external student at South West Essex Technical College. Despite knowing little English, he excelled in mathematics and science subjects. In 1951, he joined Imperial College London as a research assistant, and completed his PhD at University of London in 1954. That year, he married Jill Piggot, with whom he had three sons. Prof. Weinberg was awarded the higher degree of DSc by the University of London in 1961 for his pioneering body of work in combustion physics. He rose through the ranks at Imperial College from lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemical Technology in 1956 to Professor of Combustion Physics in 1967. He served as Director of The Combustion Institute from 1978 to 1988, and was the founder and first chairman of the Combustion Physics Group at the Institute of Physics (IOP). Prof. Weinberg was named a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1983, and was the recipient of many other awards and honors, including the Bernard Lewis Gold Medal of The Combustion Institute (1980); The Rumford Medal of the Royal Society (1988); the Italgas Prize for Energy Sciences (1991); the Smolenski Medal of the Polish Academy of Science (1999); and the Huw Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to Combustion Physics from the IOP (2005). He was the author, co-author or editor of four scientific books and more than 200 research papers in the scientific literature. He also wrote a memoir of his early years, Boy 30529, published in January 2013, a month after his death.