Marcos Moshinsky was born on 20 April 1921, in Kiev, Ukraine, and em- igrated to Mexico at the age of four. He began work at the Universidad N acional Aut6noma de Mexico on 1 January 1942, as a laboratory assis- tant working on the measurement of cosmic rays. He pursued his graduate studies at Princeton University, and wrote his thesis under the supervision of Professor Eugene Wigner. Since 1949, and in spite of many visits and temporary posts held abroad, Moshinsky has been based in Mexico. Through example and encouragement, Moshinsky may be credited to a large extent with the shaping of Mexican scientific research. He has di- rected 40 B. Sc. , M. Sc. , and Ph. D. theses, and published over 200 scientific articles and four books; he holds all the Mexican science prizes, and sev- eral international ones, being a member of 11 academies of learning.
Talent and circumstance have placed Marcos Moshinsky at the origin of several of the enterprises of the Mexican and Latin American scientific communities: he was founding editor of the Revista Mexicana de F{sica from 1952 to 1967; the Escuela Latinoamericana de Fisica was initiated and five times organized by him in Mexico; he was founding member and later president of the Academia de la Investigaci6n Cientifica (1962-1963), the Sociedad Mexicana de Fisica (1967-1969), and the Centro Internacional de Fisica y Matematicas A plicadas (1986-), in Cuernavaca.