Pavle Savić

Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, at a time of much upheaval in the Balkans still not fully free of Ottoman or Austrian control, Savić would go on to graduate with a degree in physical chemistry from the University of Belgrade in 1932. In 1939, he received a 6-month scholarship from the Académie française to study at the Radium Institute, Paris, and he would spend 4 years in France. In the years 1937 and 1938, he worked with Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie on interactions of neutrons in chemical physics of heavy elements. This turned out to be an important step in the discovery of nuclear fission.[1]Together with Irène Joliot-Curie, Savić was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.[2]

At the start of World War II, Savić left France and returned to Yugoslavia to fight for the liberation of his homeland as a partisan against German occupation. Apparently Savić was in the Soviet Union during World War II.[3]

After the war he was one of the primary promoters of the idea of constructing the Vinča Nuclear Institute in Vinča.[4][5]He was the principal of the Vinča Institute (at that time called the INS "Boris Kidrič") between 1960–1961.[6]In 1966 he assumed an academic post at his alma mater, the University of Belgrade, as a professor in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Department of Physical Chemistry and Department of Physics, now Faculty of Physics. In 1981, he took his retirement.[7]

He was also the president of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts from 1971 to 1981, the year he retired.[8]

He published his last scientific paper a few months before his death, at the age of 85, in Belgrade.

• Radivoj Kašanin

• About Pavle Savic on serbian science portal Viva fizika
• Institute for Nuclear Sciences – Vinča (Belgrade suburb)
• Institute for Physics, Belgrade
• Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade
• in German, but also links to English pages
• Velikani vremena... (in Serbian)
• about professor Pavle Savić
• A CHRONOLOGY OF THE ATOMIC VIEW OF NATURE

Category:Members of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts