Allan Jacobs, Professor Emeritus at UTSC and in the Department of Physics, passed away in Toronto on June 30, 2021.
Allan was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, earning a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Physics from UofT in 1960. He then went on to obtain an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 1962, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1968, where he studied with John Bardeen, the two-time recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Allan held a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Hamburg for a year before returning to UofT as an Assistant Professor in 1969, with his primary appointment at UTSC (known as Scarborough College at that time). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1973 and to Professor in 1983, and retired in 2004. He also worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Atomic Energy Commission of Canada.
Allan's research interests were focused on elucidating the structure of ferroelastics and frustrated antiferromagnets using theoretical approaches. Allan, Mike Walker, Allan Griffin, and Rashmi Desai, who were all hired into the Physics Department at about the same time, comprised the condensed matter theory group after Jan Van Kranendonk retired in the early 1990s.
For more information about Allan and his many interests, see:
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/thestar/obituary.aspx?pid=199331472
By Kimberly Strong
Allan's Physics Department web site: