The PPS Assemply of Delegates honoured the distinguished American physicist of Polish origin, Frank Wilczak, with an honorary membership. The proposal of the Main Board was adopted by acclamation.

Frank Anthony Wilczek was born in 1951 and grew up in a Polish-Italian family, already rooted in America for a few generations. Polish traditions were very strong in his family not only because of his grandmother, Franciszka Żybura from the Subcarpathian Babice, but also thanks to his grandfather, Jan, who enlisted in the Haller’s Army, as a volunteer from across the ocean, to fight the Bolsheviks in 1920. In his Nobel Prize biography he writes that it is in the tradition and the Catholic upbringing- attracting young mind with great dramatic events and the mysterious, divine plan of creation behind the world order- where he seeks the most deeply rooted inspirations for his intellectual formation. Despite losing his conventional faith under the influence of Bertrand Russel’s works during the studies, the existentially painful recovery of the “lost meaning, purpose and significance” remained the invaluable source of his creative exploration in physics.

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