I saw announced on Facebook, via my colleague and friend Adam Maj from Krakow, that Ben Mottelson has died. It took a couple of days for Wikipedia to catch up, but there I saw a link to a Danish news story seeming to confirm it.
Ben Mottelson was a co-recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize for his work in nuclear physics, specifically unifying the theories of single particle and collective motion in nuclei, and for showing that nuclei could be deformed in their ground states. The co-recipients of the prize, Aage Bohr and James Rainwater died in 1986 and 2009 respectively. Mottelson worked closely with Aage Bohr and though the prize was split equally three ways, the prize was effectively for Rainwater's work and for Bohr and Mottelson's largely joint work.
I don't think I've ever seen Mottelson at a conference or anywhere else, and have little I can add personally as an anecdote. He is most well-known to me as the author of the two volumes, with Aage Bohr, of the the Nuclear Structure textbook. This seminal work educated generations of nuclear physicsists. I'm afraid I haven't studied the book as much as either I should have or would have liked to, and only eventually acquired my own copy rather recently, but here I am having (or pretending to for the camera) a read of it
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