Igal Talmi, a founder of nuclear physics in Israel, dies at 101

Prof. Igal Talmi, one of the founders of nuclear physics research in Israel, died in early February 2026, a few days after his 101st birthday. The Weizmann Institute of Science, where he spent his career, announced his death on 4 February, and the Israeli news site Davar published an obituary the same day. He died less than two weeks after his wife, Hana.

Talmi was born in Kyiv on 31 January 1925 and grew up in Mandatory Palestine. After studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he completed his doctorate at ETH Zurich under Wolfgang Pauli, one of the great figures of quantum physics. In his doctoral work he developed a technique that greatly simplified calculations in the nuclear shell model, the theory that describes how protons and neutrons are arranged in layers inside the atomic nucleus. Variants of his methods are still in use.

Returning to Israel, he was among the first members of the Weizmann Institute's nuclear physics department, which he later headed. He also served as dean of the physics faculty and chaired the institute's scientific council. With his colleague Amos de-Shalit he wrote Nuclear Shell Theory (1963), long regarded as a standard text, and he later published Simple Models of Complex Nuclei (1993). He retired in 1995 but remained active in the scientific community.

Talmi received the Israel Prize in exact sciences in 1965, shared with de-Shalit, as well as the Weizmann Prize, the Rothschild Prize and the EMET Prize. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1963, later chaired its natural sciences division, and at his death was its longest-serving member.