Freydoon Mansouri died from a heart attack on April 28th. He was a professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cincinnati in US and an adjunct professor of IPM.
Freydoon Mansouri was one of the original founders of String Theory and was a close collaborator of String Theory at IPM.
He was born in Tehran in 1937 where he obtained his secondary school diploma. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, MA from Temple University in 1964, and Ph.D. from the John Hopkins University in 1969.
After graduation he joined Y. Nambu of University of Chicago where together with him and L.N. Chang produced his seminal work on String Theory and the so called Conformal Gauge in that theory. From 1974 until 1981 he was at Yale where he made important contributions to the field of Supergravity and introduced what is currently called "Mac Dowell-Mansouri Gravity". He joined University of Cincinnati in 1981 and is the author of about hundred journal articles. Since 1973 he and Farhad Ardalan have collaborated on different projects among which the early work on parastatistics which turned out to be the precursor of color.
He has been a research collaborator with scientists at IPM from its inception and has visited and lectured at IPM repeatedly.