Abolghassem Ghaffari, a former AU graduate professor and renowned mathematician, died on Nov. 6 at the age of 106. He passed away due to heart complications following an accidental fall, according to his obituary in The Washington Post.
Ghaffari taught graduate courses on Ordinary Differential Equations and Partial Differential Equations at AU from 1958 to 1962.
Ghaffari was born in Tehran, Iran in 1907 and earned his degree in mathematics from Nancy University in France in 1932. He then earned doctorate degrees from the Sorbonne in France and King’s College in London.
Ghaffari has performed research and lectured at universities in the United States, France and Iran including the University of Iran and Princeton University. While at Princeton, he worked alongside Albert Einstein on research related to the Unified Field Theory of Gravitation and Electromagnetism, according to PressTV.
Ghaffari was the first Iranian to work for NASA, where he was a part of the team for the Apollo moon landing with his work on trajectory calculations, according to PressTV.
More recently, Ghaffari received the distinguished scholar award in 2007 from the Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage and was appointed as a Hall of Fame inductee by the Spirit of Noted Achievers at Harvard University.
Ghaffari moved to Los Angeles, Calif. in 2004 with his family. Survivors include his wife of 47 years Mitra Meshkati Ghaffari and two daughters.
