Jamal Nazrul Islam:
The Physicist Who Came Home

In 1981, one of the world's leading cosmologists packed up his life in London and moved to Chittagong for a salary of 2,800 taka a month. The university had refused to offer him 3,000. He took the job anyway.

Professor Dr. Jamal Nazrul Islam had turned down a tenured position at City University London. He had published research through the Royal Society on the recommendation of Stephen Hawking and Fred Hoyle. He had written a book on the fate of the universe that Cambridge University Press had just accepted for publication. He came home because he wanted to, and Bangladesh made it as difficult as it reasonably could.

This is the story of a man the country produced and barely held on to.

Jhenaidah to Cambridge

He was born on 24 February 1939 in Jhenaidah — a quiet district town in what was then British India. His father, Sirajul Islam, was a sub-judge. His mother, Rahat Ara Begum, translated Rabindranath Tagore's Dakghar into Urdu and sang well enough that people remembered it. There were eight children. His mother died when Jamal was ten.

The name carries history. His family had ties to the household of national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, with regular visits between them. When the boy was born, the name was chosen in that spirit. Jamal means beautiful.

He studied up to Class 4 in Calcutta, then came to Chittagong. The principal of Chittagong Collegiate School, seeing what he was dealing with, skipped him directly to Class 6. He completed Class 8 and left for Lawrence College in Pakistan, taking his love of mathematics with him. He came back to Calcutta for Saint Xavier's College, where he found Father Gore — a teacher who explained mathematical ideas the way few could, and who was glad to have a student who wasn't afraid of them.

He told an interviewer years later:

"Mathematics was something many people feared. But it was where all my interest and pull lived. Perhaps that's why he liked me." Jamal Nazrul Islam

He finished his BSc from Calcutta University in 1957. He was 18. Two years later he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, completing the Mathematics Tripos — a three-year course he finished in two. His classmates included Jayant Narlikar, later one of India's most prominent mathematicians, and Brian Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 at 33. One year his senior was James Mirrlees, Nobel Economics 1996. His teacher John Pople won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998, the same year as Amartya Sen.

He mentioned this cohort not to claim reflected glory but to describe what it felt like to study in a place where the best minds of a generation worked in the same rooms.

He completed his MSc in 1960 and his PhD in 1964, at 25, in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. Cambridge awarded him a postdoctoral position before his thesis was even submitted — a distinction that is, as it sounds, uncommon. In 1982, Cambridge conferred the Doctor of Science degree, its highest research award.

The Work

His career moved across four countries over two decades.

The work that ran through all of it was cosmology — specifically, how the universe ends.

In 1977, he published "Possible Ultimate Fate of the Universe" in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. It drew attention from colleagues. The following year, Steven Weinberg published The First Three Minutes, a book about the universe's beginning. Islam looked at both and decided someone should write about the other end.

In his own words:

"My colleagues found the paper interesting and exciting. Then Weinberg's book appeared — dealing with the beginning of the universe. These two things together made me think: a book on the final fate would be worthwhile. Then Sky and Telescope magazine asked me to write a piece for a general audience on the same subject. The response to it is what led me to write the book." Jamal Nazrul Islam

His 1985 book Rotating Fields in General Relativity, also from Cambridge University Press, grew from his Royal Society work and is what earned him the Doctor of Science. He also wrote An Introduction to Mathematical Cosmology, which remains in use today.

In Bengali, he wrote Krishno Bibar — a complete, rigorous account of black holes in eighty pages, published by Bangla Academy in 1985. A technically rigorous science book in Bengali was close to nonexistent at the time. He understood that science in your own language is science you can build on.

He described his widening research areas with characteristic dryness:

"I call it — jokingly — 'wider, but not necessarily deeper.'" Jamal Nazrul Islam

The Return

The return to Bangladesh is the part of the story that stops you.

When colleagues heard he wanted to come back, they urged him toward Dhaka University. He refused. His ancestral home was in Chittagong. He would go to Chittagong University, and that was settled. A Dhaka University professor, A.M. Harun or Rashid, went to Chittagong personally to arrange the appointment — twice, because the first attempt stalled in departmental politics and the physics post fell through. Eventually a mathematics position was created.

A year after joining, when research needs took him back to London, the university refused him academic leave — a standard entitlement for professors. He left by resigning his post. In 1984, he sold everything he owned in London and returned for good. The university reinstated him, raised his salary to 3,000 taka, and counted the time away as academic leave.

Harun or Rashid wrote about it later:

"Jamal told me he wasn't going to Dhaka. He was going to Chittagong, because that's where his ancestral home was. I tried to explain that he might not find the best students there, that his research might suffer. He didn't listen to any of it. His mind was made up." Prof. A.M. Harun or Rashid, Dhaka University

That was it. His mind was made up.

At Chittagong University, he built the Research Centre for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. He taught. He wrote. He stayed.

Honours

• 1985Bangladesh Academy of Science Gold Medal
• 1994National Science and Technology Medal
• 1998Third World Academy of Sciences Medal Lecture — Abdus Salam Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy
• 2001Ekushey Padak — Bangladesh's second highest civilian honour
• 2011Razzak-Shamsun Lifetime Achievement Award — University of Dhaka

Beyond physics and mathematics, he wrote on biology, economics, music, and the role of mother-tongue language in science education. He thought the boundaries between fields were too small to be taken seriously.

Professor Dr. Jamal Nazrul Islam died on 16 March 2013 in Chittagong. He was 74.

His research centre still operates. Researchers trained there have gone on to work internationally. The light he set going keeps going.