Low joined the MIT Physics Department in 1956. During his tenure, Low became Institute Professor, considered the highest honor awarded by the university’s faculty and administration. He also held the Carl Taylor Compton Chair in Physics. He was a specialist in high energy physics and his theoretical ideas shaped much of modern particle physics as well as condensed matter physics. Low served as Director for the Center for Theoretical Physics and of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science before becoming Provost in 1980.

During his five year term as Provost he played a major role in developing MIT’s afiliation Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Low was born in New York City and grew up on Washington Square Park in the Village. Both his mother and grandmother were physicians and made house calls throughout the city. His father was a mining engineer whose first love was socialist politics. His grandfather, Sergius Ingerman, also a physician, helped form the Socialist Party of America at the turn of the century.

At a young age, Francis Low discovered that he loved the piano and thought that he might dedicate his life to music. Then he spent his last two years of high school at Ecole Internationale in Geneva, Switzerland where he fell in love with Physics. During those years, he also became fluent in French. He said learning his first language was liberating and he went on to tackle other languages. He eventually learned, as he liked to say, fair Italian, poor German and Pidgin Russian.

Low went to college at Harvard just as the war was breaking out in Europe. He took an extra course load so he could graduate in three years and join the war effort.

He served as a mule driver in Italy in the 10th Mountain Division and rose to the rank of Survey Sergeant in the field artillery. He was very proud of his mule driver service pointing out frequently that it was an honor few elementary particle Physicists had enjoyed.

After the war, Low returned home to New York City and imagined that he would devote himself to music and began to look for work in the field. It took him three weeks to discover that it wasn’t going to happen and that perhaps devoting his life to music was “like living on ice cream.” Instead he went to graduate school at Columbia University and got his Ph.D. in Physics.

After receiving his doctorate, he did his post-doctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The institute was one of the top centers for young theorists under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who called it his “intellectual hotel”. Low went on to become a professor of Physics at the University of Illinois in Champagne Urbana, before joining MIT.

During his life, Low learned to fly small airplanes, was an avid skier and a passionate tennis player. In fact, it was his fantasy that his obituary would read Francis Low died yesterday after collapsing during a tennis game. It was not to be.

Low never stopped playing the piano and composing music. He once wrote a musical with his best friend, Alvin Kahn, based on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It never sold but Low spent the rest of his life dreaming that it might.

Francis Low was married for nearly 55 years to his wife Natalie, a psychologist whom he met on a blind date. Ironically, she also died on the Friday before President’s Day four years ago. He is survived by three children, Julie Low of Haverford, PA, Peter Low of New York City, and Margaret Low Smith of Rockville, MD; six grandchildren, all boys, which he liked to point out was statistically rare.