Asghar Qadir

Asghar Qadir
Qadir in 2023
Born	(1946-07-23) 23 July 1946 Shimla, British Indian Empire (present-day Himachal Pradesh, India)
Citizenship	Pakistan
Alma mater	University of London Imperial College London
Known for	His work on the mathematical sciences, relativity, economics, cosmology
Awards	Hilal-i-Imtiaz (2008) Sitara-i-Imtiaz (1999)[1] Pakistan Academy of Sciences Gold Medal in 1996[1] Fulbright Award (1979)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) University of Texas at Austin (UT)
Doctoral advisor	Roger Penrose
Other academic advisors	John Archibald Wheeler

Asghar Qadir, HI, SI, FPAS (Urdu: اصغر قادر‎ born 23 July 1946) is a Pakistani mathematician, physicist and economist. In mathematics he contributed to the fields of differential equations, number theory and special functions. In physics his major contributions are to general relativity, astrophysics, cosmology, quantum field theory, and related fields. In economics he worked on critiquing the usual approach to Islamic economics, and introduced the ideas of dual sector inflation and quantum economics. He was an educationist: as a university teacher and administrator; and planning for the development of his fields of work in Pakistan, and to some extent in other parts of the Third World.^[2][3]

His father, Manzur Qadir s/o Sir Abdul Qadir and mother, Asghari d/o Fazl-i-Hussain, married in 1936 and had a daughter, Shirin, in 1939 and a son, Basharat, in 1944. The son had a congenital disease, anidrotic ectodermal dysplasia, because of which he does not sweat, so his mother had gone to Simla in the summer of 1946, where Asghar was born with the same congenital defect. Their mother opened a nursery school in 1949 at her house, for them to study without exposure to excessive heat. Asghar studied at Cathedral School from 1953 to 1958, and then accompanied his parents to Karachi, where his father had to go as Foreign Minister. The family had to shift to Rawalpindi with the government, and Asghar took the matriculation examination privately, but attending classes at St. Mary's School in 1960. He joined Gordon College, Rawalpindi for the F.Sc., which he obtained in 1962. As his father then became Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court, they shifted to Lahore, where Asghar joined Government College, Lahore to obtain a B.Sc. in 1964, in Mathematics and Physics. He went to the Imperial College of Science and Technology, of the London University, for a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Physics, obtained in 1967 (along with an ARCS) and then a DIC in Theoretical Physics in 1968 from Imperial. He joined Roger Penrose for the PhD in General Relativity^[4] at the Mathematics Department of Birkbeck College, London University, which he was awarded on the 1st of February 1971. He married Rabiya d/o Mr. A.A. Mirza in 1972 and had two sons, Ali and Usman in 1973 and 1974, respectively.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

Asghar Qadir joined the Mathematics Department of the Islamabad University, later called the Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU), in September 1971 as a Research Associate and continued at that University till 2004, with periods of Sabbatical and Extraordinary Leave, becoming Assistant Professor in 1973, Associate Professor in 1982, full Professor in 1987 and Meritorious Professor in 2000. He served as Chairman of the Department for over ten years, and Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences for over a year. He expressed his objections to various actions of the Vice Chancellor at QAU and resigned in protest in 2003. His resignation was converted to early retirement by the Syndicate of the University and accepted in 2004. He then joined the National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), Islamabad and set up the Centre for Advanced Mathematics and Physics. He continued as its Director General till it was enlarged and converted to the School of Natural Sciences in late 2009 and then served as Principal of the School till the middle of 2011. He was then appointed Professor Emeritus for over seven years till January 2019 in the Physics Department. He was then appointed Advisor till June 2019, after which he left NUST. ^[1]

During the summers of 1966 and 1967 Asghar Qadir worked in the Beams Group of the proton synchrotron, NIMROD, at the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory (now called the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), where he developed a Fortran IV Library subroutine for interpolation. This was needed to increase the efficiency of NIMROD from the low value of 7% to the design efficiency of 25%.

He went on Sabbatical Leave to work with John Archibald Wheeler at the Centre for Theoretical Physics of the University of Texas at Austin on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1978/79 and a Fulbright Hayes Fellowship in 1986/87. ^[10] He attended summer courses in Mathematics at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in 1972, 1975 and 1978 and attended the first Marcel Grossmann Meeting in 1972 and a Conference on Mathematical Economics there in 1978, In 1980 he was appointed Associate Member of the ICTP for six years in 1980, extended for another term till 1992, when he was made Senior Associate till 1999. During the terms funds are provided to the members but they retain the title without additional funds for life. He continued to visit the ICTP many times apart from those visits. He was appointed Research Associate at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) in an honorary capacity from 1980 and then appointed Senior Fellow there in 1988. Also in 1980 he was appointed as Associate Director for Physics, Mathematics and Economics at the Centre of Basic Sciences (COBS) of the University Grants Commission of Pakistan in an honorary capacity which was converted to Director in 1988.^[5]

He went for one semester to the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI), during the Fall of 1993, as Professor of Mathematics to set up the Mathematics programme there, apart from helping with setting up the scheduling structure and the Faculty of Mathematics and Applied Physics. He then completed his permitted three years of Extraordinary Leave from 1994 to 1997 to go as Professor of Mathematics of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. When the rules of his University were changed to allow a total of five years, he went to KFUPM for two more years of leave from 2000 to 2002. After that he accepted an honorary appointment as Adjunct Professor there, on which he had to go for three to six weeks to KFUPM per year. He resigned from this position in 2015. He had many short visits to the Department of Physics of the La Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, starting in 1978. He also had many summer vacation visits to the Physics Department of the Salento University of Lecce, Italy, starting from 1995, and developed a collaboration between it and NUST. He visited the Centre of the Department of Computation and Applied Mathematics, Centre for Differential Equations, Continuum Mechanics and Applications (DECMA) of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg first in 1999 and then very frequently, and was given an honorary appointment as Visiting Professor at the Department. He developed a collaboration between DECMA and NUST as well.^[1]

After leaving NUST he took appointments as Visiting Professor for a semester or two at the Physics Department of GIKI, at the Abdus Salam School of Mathematics of the Government College University, Lahore, the Physics Department of the COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, and the Mathematics Department of QAU.^[5]

As part of COBS, Asghar Qadir visited all nine public sector universities of the time, to see what could be done to improve the standard of the subjects he was charged with. Some funds were provided for this purpose. He was also required to rank the departments for each subject in all the universities. He proposed that for Physics and Mathematics an M.Phil. (Sandwich) programme of four years for in-service teachers be run during the summer vacations, and that PIDE be given degree giving status and asked to run an M.Phil. programme to generate adequate human resources in Economics.^[11][5] Further, that faculty from the weaker departments should be funded to visit the top departments in each field, with the funding managed as the ICTP Associate programme did. Despite excellent feedback on the programme for Mathematics and good feedback for Physics, the programmed was discontinued. Various bureaucratic hurdles delayed the approval of the degree-giving status to PIDE for nearly a quarter of a century and it was not used as he had proposed for in-service training of faculty at the weaker universities.^[12][13]

He was also tasked with listing the errors in the School and College level textbooks and recommending how the situation could be improved. There were too many errors to list and he gave a list of the types of errors and tried to get them removed. However, only some errors were removed and many more introduced, so he recommended that foreign textbooks be used. This attempt was partially successful. In 1986, at the request of the Education Department of the Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) Government, with a hand-picked tam he ran an extremely successful Refresher course for teachers of F.Sc. classes in Mathematics, that concentrated on dealing with the textbook problems faced by the teachers. He replicated the Refresher course at the behest of the UGC for the teachers of B.Sc. Mathematics in Pakistan in 1988.^[14] He recommended that the graduates of the M. Phil. Sandwich programme of Mathematics, with help from participants of the refresher courses, be used to replicate such refresher courses around the whole country and AJK, but this was not done as the Sandwich programme was discontinued. On noting that Pakistan was lagging behind in Science and Technology (S&T) the Ministry had tried sending selected students for training in these area. However, they performed badly because of lack of an adequate educational base. For this purpose COBS set up S&T training programmes for the candidates who would be sent abroad to select and first train them in Pakistan. Asghar Qadir was one of the major resource persons for these courses.^[15][16]

He was asked to participate in various sub-committees of the Planning Commission for different five year plans, for education, higher education, S&T, and for human resource development. In particular, he was asked to work on the sub-committee for “scientific manpower for the year 2000+, from which he withdrew after attending it for some on the grounds that the Committee lacked clarity of what was needed. He was asked to provide a “vision statement” for the Pakistan Council of Science and Technology for development of highly qualified scientific human resources, which was provided. He was put in various Think Tanks, including one for shifting from the two year B.Sc. and two year M.Sc. to the four year BS, which took time to be completed. He was put in charge of a Task Force for developing Mathematics in Pakistan which proposed a National Centre for Mathematics on the lines of the ICTP, which was adopted, but was totally unsuccessful.^[17]

• Hilal-i-Imtiaz, Government of Pakistan (2008)
• (First) Distinguished National Professor, HEC Pakistan (2004) (for life)
• ISESCO Award for Mathematics (2003)
• Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Government of Pakistan (1999)
• Gold Medal, Pakistan Academy of Sciences (1996)
• Al Khwarizmi First Prize for Mathematics, by Government of Iran (1995)
• Prize, National Book Council of Pakistan, (1991)
• Senior Fulbright Fellowship, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, USA, (1986–87)
• Fulbright Hayes Award (1978–79)
• First prize in General Knowledge Contest for High School Students (1961);

• Senior research fellow at Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), from 1980 to 1994
• Joint secretary at Al-Kindi Society for the Advancement of the Philosophy of Science, Islamabad, Pakistan, (1980)
• Associate member and senior associate of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy, 1980–1999
• Life member and vice-president, Albert Einstein Society (Pakistan Chapter) (1985 to date)
• Life member, joint secretary and secretary, Pakistan Physical Society. (1992 and 1993)
• Life member and president, Fulbright Alumni Association, (1992–1993)

His recent newspaper articles include:

• Two Beacons of light (2017)^[18]
• Why the compulsory study of Islamiyat and Pakistan Studies is dividing us (2016)^[19]
• Don't take too much notice of university rankings, they're flawed (2016)^[20]
• Did Malala deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? (2014)^[21]
• Remembering Uncle Khushwant (2014)^[22]

His academic books include:

• Topology for Beginners (with Noor Muhammad and Imran Parvez Khan) (2022)^[23]
• Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (2020)^[24]
• Relativity: An Introduction to the Special Theory (1989)^[25]

His other publications include

• Popular Science: Fictional and Non-Fictional Dimensions^[26]
• Riazuddin: In Memoriam (2014)^[27]
• International Symposium on Experimental Gravitation (1994) by Munawar Karim and Asghar Qadir
• 5th International Summer College on Physics and Contemporary Needs (1990)
• 12th Regional Conference On Mathematical Physics (2008) by Aslam, M Jamil, Hussain, Faheem, Qadir, Asghar
• Gravitational Wave Sources May Be "Further" Than We Think by Asghar Qadir
• On Quantum Effects Near a Black Hole Singularity (2008) by Asghar Qadir, Asghar, Azad A. Siddiqui
• Mathematical physics: proceedings of the 12th Regional Conference by Riazuddin, Asghar Qadir, Faheem Hussain, Hamid Saleem, M. Jamil Aslam.

• Roger Penrose
• Riazuddin
• Oliver Penrose
• Partial Differential Equation
• University of Islamabad
• National University of Sciences and Technology
• Muhammad Sharif
• Ismat Beg

• MIT Page of Asghar Qadir
• Pakistan Academy of Sciences page on Professor Asghar Qadir
• Pakistan Mathematical Society