Distinguished guests from Canada, France, Germany and India assembled at McMaster on May 6 to celebrate the 65th birthday of physics & astronomy professor Rajat Bhaduri.

In his honour, his collaborators Matthias Brack (Regensburg), Jimmy Law (Guelph) and Mahendra Murthy (Madras), planned a surprise day-long symposium with the support of the Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Faculty of Science.

A total of 15 lectures covering many distinct areas of theoretical physics were presented. The day ended with a lively banquet attended by close to 80 guests, where members of Bhaduri's extended family, former and current students, and friends from other universities paid tribute to his multi-faceted career.

Rajat Bhaduri studied at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, before completing his McMaster PhD in just two years.

After two years at Oxford with Sir Rudolf Peierls, he returned to McMaster and joined the Faculty in 1968. His present research interests include the connection between quantum mechanics and classical periodic orbits in non-integrable systems, as well as manifestations of quantum statistics in low-dimensional systems, including Bose-Einstein condensation.

A gifted teacher, Bhaduri has published three books: Structure of the Nucleus (1975) with M. A. Preston, Models of the Nucleon, from Quarks to Soliton(1988), and Semiclassical Physics (1997) with M. Brack. The titles reflect the evolution of his research career and all have been widely used as graduate-level texts.