ICTP in Brief July August 2006

Fri Sep 1 12:26:49 CEST 2006

    ICTP IN BRIEF

Bi-monthly unabridged listing of news published on http://news.ictp.it/ 
<http://news.ictp.it>

*13/7/2006*

      Visit of G-77 Chairman <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=176>

D.S. Kumalo, South Africa's Ambassador to the United Nations and current 
Chairman of the Group of 77, visited ICTP on 6-7 June to discuss future 
avenues of cooperation between the G-77 and Trieste's international 
scientific institutions. Kumalo agreed to have the G77 explore 
possibilities for transforming the Trieste-based Third World Network of 
Scientific Organizations (TWNSO), an affiliated organization of the 
Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), into the G77 
Consortium on Science and Technology. A formal endorsement of this 
measure is expected to take place at the TWAS General Meeting to be held 
in Brazil during the first week in September. With 132 members, the G-77 
is the largest coalition of developing countries in the United Nations.

*17/7/2006*

      Trieste Science Prize 2006 <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=177>

Jacob Palis, former chairman of the ICTP Scientific Council, is one of 
four eminent scientists from the developing world to win the Trieste 
Science Prize 2006. Palis, director emeritus of the Institute of Pure 
and Applied Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro, and a frequent visitor to the 
Centre, will share the Trieste Science Prize in mathematics with C.S. 
Seshadri, founding director, Chennai Mathematical Institute in India. 
The Trieste Science Prize winners in the medical sciences are Chen 
Ding-Shinn, dean of the National Taiwan University College of Medicine, 
and Rao Zihe, professor of Tsinghua University, China. The Trieste 
Science Prize, a joint venture of the Academy of Sciences for the 
Developing World (TWAS) and Illycaffè, is designed to bring honour and 
recognition to the developing world's most eminent scientists. A 
US$100,000 cash award will be divided among the four winners. For 
additional information, see www.twas.org <http://www.twas.org>.

*2/8/2006*

      Furlan honoured <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=178>

Giuseppe Furlan, head of ICTP's Training and Research in Italian 
Laboratories (TRIL), has been awarded the Ravani-Pellati prize for 
physics 2006 for his outstanding contributions to scientific research 
and international cooperation. The award, which carries a EUR10,000 cash 
prize, is given by the Science Academy of Turin in northern Italy.

      Chinese Delegation Visits ICTP <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=179>

On 1 August, a five-person delegation from China met with ICTP staff, 
including Claudio Tuniz, assistant director, Dag Johannansen, director 
of administration, and George Thompson, head, Office of External 
Activities. The purpose of the visit was to learn more about the 
Centre's activities to promote scientific capacity building in the 
developing world. ZHANG Xinsheng, China's deputy minister of education, 
led the delegation. ZHANG also chairs the Chinese National Commission at 
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 
(UNESCO) and is president of the executive council at UNESCO. Philippe 
Pypaert, programme specialist, UNESCO's Regional Bureau for Science in 
Europe, accompanied the delegation.

*4/8/2006*

      Tosatti Honoured <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=180>

Erio Tosatti, former acting director of ICTP and currently professor of 
condensed matter physics at the International School for Advanced 
Studies (SISSA), has been elected a corresponding member of /Accademia 
dei Lincei/ <http://www.lincei.it/> in the category of physics, 
mathematics and natural sciences. Founded in 1603 and counting Galileo 
among its first members, Lincei is one of the world's oldest and most 
prestigious science academies.

*7/8/2006*

      Books on Fonda and Ghirardi <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=181>

/Luciano Fonda: His Life and Scientific Achievements/, edited by Fonda's 
closest scientific collaborator, GianCarlo Ghirardi, is a warm and 
detailed homage to a leading theoretical physicist who died in 1998. 
Fonda, who played a key role in the development of the Elettra 
Synchrotron Light Laboratory in Trieste, was a long-time professor of 
physics at the University of Trieste and an ICTP consultant. The first 
two chapters of the book contain recollections by friends, colleagues 
and collaborators; subsequent chapters consist of many of Fonda's most 
important papers in the fields of elementary particles, resonance 
reactions, symmetries, and synchrotron radiation, with comments from his 
colleagues.
/Quantum Mechanics/, edited by Angelo Bassi, Detlef Dürr, Tullio Weber 
and Angelo Zanghi, is a collection of talks and discussions given in 
September 2005 on the occasion of GianCarlo Ghirardi's 70th birthday. 
Consecutive meetings were organized in his honour: one at ICTP (Are 
There Quantum Jumps?) and another in Losinj, Croatia (On the Present 
Status of Quantum Mechanics). GianCarlo Ghirardi, professor of quantum 
mechanics at the University of Trieste and head of ICTP's Associate and 
Federation Scheme, is an internationally renowned scientist, 
particularly in the field of the conceptual foundations of quantum 
mechanics.

      2006 ICTP Prize <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=182>

Rajesh Gopakumar, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, India, 
has been awarded the 2006 ICTP Prize. Gopakumar is a highly accomplished 
string theorist whose important contributions to the field include 
papers on large N gauge theories, solitons in noncommutative field 
theories and topological string theory. His work on the latter topic, 
conducted with Cumrun Vafa, inspired the theory of Gopakumar-Vafa 
invariants in mathematics. More recently, he has pioneered a programme 
to understand the free field theory limit of the correspondence between 
quantum field theories and gravitational systems in one higher 
dimension. The 2006 ICTP Prize is being given in honour of Gian-Carlo 
Wick (1909-1992), a student of Enrico Fermi, who is well-known among 
theoretical physicists for "Wick's theorem" and "Wick rotation". Wick 
visited ICTP in 1973 to participate the Topical Meeting on Weak 
Interactions. The official awards ceremony will be held at a later date.

*8/8/2006*

      Zoller Wins Dirac Medal 2006 <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=183>

Peter Zoller, professor of physics at the University of Innsbruck and 
scientific director of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum 
Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has won the Dirac Medal 
<http://news.ictp.it/php/linkout/o.php?out=http://www.ictp.trieste.it/%7Esci_info/awards/Dirac/DiracMedal.html> 
2006. Zoller is being honoured for his innovative and prolific 
accomplishments in atomic physics, including his seminal work in 
proposing methods to use trapped ions for quantum computing and 
describing how to realize the Bose-Hubbard model and associated phase 
transitions in ultracold gases.

*22/8/2006*

      Perelman wins Fields Medal <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=184>

Grigori Perelman is among the four 2006 Fields Medallists. The 
announcement was made in Madrid today, 22 August, during the opening 
ceremony of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Perelman's 
proof, which verifies Poincare's Conjecture, solves one of mathematics' 
most perplexing problems, first presented by the great French 
mathematician and physicist in 1904. Last June, participants in ICTP's 
Summer School and Conference on Geometry and Topology of 3-Manifolds 
<http://cdsagenda5.ictp.it/full_display.php?ida=a04195> became one of 
the first group's to reaffirm Perelman's proof. See Shapes, Spaces and 
Spheres 
<http://www.ictp.trieste.it/%7Esci_info/News_from_ICTP/News_113/features_Poincare.html>, 
/News from ICTP/, Summer 2005, for a detailed description of their efforts.
Other 2006 Fields Medallists are Andrei Okounkov, University of 
California at Berkeley; Terence Tao, University of California at Los 
Angeles; and Wendelin Werner, /Université de Paris Sud/, Orsay, France. 
Werner spoke at ICTP's School and Conference on Probability Theory in 2002.

      Nobel Laureate at Center <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=185>

Nobel Laureate Karl-Alex Müller (Physics 1987) will speak at the opening 
session of ICTP's International Symposium on the Jahn-Teller Effects: 
Novel Aspects in Orbital Physics and Vibronic Dynamics of Molecules and 
Crystals 
<http://cdsagenda5.ictp.trieste.it/full_display.php?smr=0&ida=a05220>. 
His talk will take place in the Main Lecture Hall on 28 August at 10 
a.m. Müller shared the Nobel Prize with his colleague George Bednorz, 
who were both working at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in 
Rüschlikon, Switzerland, at that time. They were honoured "for their 
important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic 
materials." Müller has visited the Centre on five previous occasions.

*24/8/2006*

      Smirnov Wins 2005 Pontecorvo Prize
      <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=186>

Alexei Smirnov, a scientist with ICTP's High Energy Physics Section 
<http://www.ictp.it/pages/research/hecap.html>, is a co-recipient of the 
2005 Bruno Pontecorvo Prize. Smirnov is being honoured "for his 
prediction and study of the influence of matter on neutrino 
oscillations, now known as the MSW (Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein) 
effect." The prize ceremony took place at the XXXIII International 
Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP 2006) in Moscow, where Smirnov 
shared the prize with Stanislav Mikheyev, Institute for Nuclear 
Research, Moscow, and Lincoln Wolfenstein, Carnegie Mellon University, 
Pittsburgh, PA, USA. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) and 
Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems in Dubna, Russia, established 
the Pontecorvo Prize in 1995 to honour distinguished scientists for the 
most significant investigations in elementary particle physics. Previous 
recipients include Art McDonald, Director of the Sudbury Neutrino 
Observatory (SNO); Yoji Totsuka, Director General, High Energy 
Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Japan; and Academician Georgi 
Zatsepin, JINR.
Bruno Pontecorvo was a distinguished Italian-born scientist, who served 
as an assistant of Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi at /La Sapienza/ 
University in Rome in the early 1930s. He emigrated to the Soviet Union 
in 1950, where he continued his research on the decay of the muon and on 
neutrinos.

*28/8/2006*

      Former Diploma Student in PRL <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=187>

The 28 July edition of /Physical Review Letters/ featured an article by 
Ignacio Franco, a former ICTP Diploma student in condensed matter 
physics. The article, "Laser-Induced Spatial Symmetry Breaking in 
Quantum and Classical Mechanics," co-authored by his colleague Paul 
Brumer, was based on a research that they did at the University of 
Toronto, Canada. A figure from the article was featured on the cover. 
Franco, who is from Colombia, graduated from ICTP Diploma Programme in 
2002. He is a PhD student at the University of Toronto.

*30/8/2006*

      Nigerian Academy Honours Chidume <http://news.ictp.it/index.php?p=188>

Charles Chidume, a member of ICTP's Mathematics group, has been elected 
a member of the Nigerian Academy of Sciences. Established in 1977, the 
Nigerian Academy of Sciences is one of Africa's oldest and most 
prestigious science academies. It currently has 97 members. Chidume is 
being honoured for his innovative contributions to functional analysis 
and nonlinear operator theory. Chidume is also widely recognized for his 
efforts to train young African mathematicians.

©2005-2006 ICTP || *news.ictp.it* <http://news.ictp.it>

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