Nicholas Kurti was elected a Fellow of Brasenose in 1947. Born in Budapest and educated there, and then in Paris and Berlin, Kurti arrived in Oxford in 1933 to work at the Clarendon Laboratory. In 1956 he became famous for an experiment, which reached a temperature of one microkelvin, and demonstrated the experiment for Tomorrow's World in 1960. A Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Physics at Oxford University (1967-1975), he was an enthusiastic cook, well-known for a talk given in 1969 entitled The physicist in the kitchen. He is considered to be one of the founders of molecular gastronomy, a term now associated with several modern-day chefs.
His archive is held by the Bodleian Library.
For a 2019 tribute to Nicholas Kurti please see our blog.