Prominent Iranian mathematician Professor Abolghassem Ghaffari passed away on the night of Tuesday November 5, 2013, at the age of 106.

Abolghassem Ghafari was born in Tehran in 1906, studied at Darolfonoon School and was part of the first group of Iranian students sent to study in France. He pursued his masters in mathematics at France’s Nancy University and obtained his PhD in mathematics from Sorbonne with a PhD thesis entitled “Brownian Motion from the Perspective of Advanced Mathematics”, which led to his meeting with Albert Einstein. Brownian motion was also the topic of one of Einstein’s five articles in 1905.

In addition to teaching at the Universities of Tehran, Princeton, Harvard and Washington, Ghaffari was the first Iranian to find his way into NASA and the only foreign national involved in the orbital calculations of the Apollo 11 project at NASA’s Goddard Space Centre. He even received the NASA…