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.

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.

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 €10,000 cash prize, is given by the Science Academy of Turin in northern Italy.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 became one of the first group’s to reaffirm Perelman’s proof. See Shapes, Spaces and Spheres, 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 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. 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.

Alexei Smirnov, a scientist with ICTP’s High Energy Physics Section, 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.

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.

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.