Honored by Mayor
CCNY Physics Prof Gets Grain of Glory

By HOWARD MEGDAL

HERNAN A. MAKSE: Goes with the grain.

Among the recipients of Mayor Bloomberg's Awards for Excellence in Science and Technology was Hernan A. Makse, an Associate Professor of Physics at City College.

Mr. Makse deals in theories relating to granular materials and soft condensed matter. His work has helped in the understanding of glasses and other disordered systems, such as sand dunes.

Cites Father's Influence

A native of Brazil, he began studying math early.

"My father would often ask me about sines, cosines and trigonometry for his work," Mr. Makse said in a Jan. 11 e-mail interview. "I guess that I was lucky to be growing up in an environment where kids were not so pressed by society to follow paths which could bring them only materialistic fulfillment."

He studied physics at Boston University, where his love for grains first asserted itself.

"During my Ph.D. studies at Boston University I was interested in the patterns that appear in sedimentary rocks," he said. "Sedimentary rocks are composed of layers of different grains, a pattern that is called stratification. I was intrigued by these patterns."

He found a similarity between those patterns and the patterns of bread crumbs, not in the lab, but in the kitchen.

"One day I was playing with grains - actually I was cooking Milanesas, a typical Argentinian dish, and I poured bread crumbs on the table," Mr. Makse said. "I found that by pouring grains of different sizes, like in a pile of sand, the grains separate in layers, just like the ones observed in sedimentary rocks. This led me to investigate this phenomenon further, and eventually I ended up being an 'expert' in granular materials."

Mr. Makse, who did not know he was nominated for the award, expressed "complete surprise" when the Mayor's secretary told him he'd won last week.

Next up for the professor?

"The development of statistical mechanics theories to understand not only granular matter, but also the so-called soft materials, which include colloids, such as paints, emulsions, blood or milk," he said.