Tribute to Nuccio Ordine

It is with great sadness that IHES learnt of Nuccio Ordine’s passing on Saturday June 10, 2023. Barely a month before he had spent six weeks at IHES as an invited researcher.

We publish a tribute written by physicist Ugo Moschella, professor at Università dell’Insubria, Italy, a regular visitor to IHES and a great friend of Nuccio Ordine’s.

Nuccio Ordine was a passionate man. He would not sit down with the aloof. He loved and sought beauty in everything and in every encounter.

He wouldn’t have given up his Belles Lettres and his Giordano Bruno for anything in the world. He loved his true friends, his dog Chiron and his land, the beautiful and bitter Calabria, all with the same intensity.

Many universities abroad would have liked to have him at any price. But he chose to remain in Cosenza, to educate generations of young Calabrians. Some of them were seen crying their eyes out during his secular funeral. I saw similar tears in Nuccio’s eyes so many times when he spoke of his master Alain-Philippe Segonds.

Not all of his academic colleagues liked him. Success, beauty and happiness are rarely forgiven. But could someone like him have reduced himself to an epigone of some academic conventicle? No, he couldn’t. His horizon was the world, upon which he radiated his explosive energy.

France, which welcomed him with open arms and mutual love from an early age, was Nuccio’s second home. His best-known book, L’utilité de l’inutile, was first written in French and only later published in Italian. Since then, it has been translated into about forty different languages. In Spain and South America, Nuccio was and will remain an example of civil commitment, culminating in the Princesa de Asturias prize that he was supposed to receive from the King of Spain in October.

News of this success reached him during his stay at IHES in April and May 2023. What was this writer doing at IHES? Nothing human was foreign to him. As a great specialist in the Italian Renaissance, he advocated the unity of knowledge as the source of a true civilization. As the world’s leading expert on Giordano Bruno, he knew well the scientific revolution and the cultural role of science and mathematics, something that scientists themselves ignore sometimes.

And so Nuccio, through me, had made friends with Alain Connes, Thibault Damour and Laurent Lafforgue. Friendship is the only thing that, when shared, increases rather than diminishes. His dialogues with these researchers were published in Italy in the newspaper “Il Corriere della sera”.

During his stay at IHES, he established friendly relations with the permanent members, as well as with other visitors and the staff. All were deeply affected by his unexpected death.

The conversations he had with Maxim Kontsevich and Hugo Duminil-Copin are gone with him and will remain in his heart. In a strange twist of fate, IHES was the last stop on Nuccio Ordine’s journey on this earth.

The world now mourns the loss of a great intellectual and a passionate defender of being human. I, and IHES, I believe, mourn the loss of an irreplaceable friend.

Ugo Moschella
Professor of Theoretical Physics
Università dell’Insubria