Alder, Kawasaki Named This Year’s Boltzmann Medalists

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics has announced that Berni Alder and Kyozi Kawasaki will each be awarded the Boltzmann Medal, which honors outstanding achievement in statistical physics. The winners will receive their medals in July at IUPAP’s International Conference on Statistical Physics in Cancun, Mexico.

Alder was acknowledged for “inventing the technique of molecular dynamics simulation and showing that with such ‘computer experiments’ important discoveries in the field of statistical mechanics can be made, in particular the melting/crystallization transition of hard spheres and the long-time decay of autocorrelation functions in fluids,” according to the citation. Alder is a professor emeritus of applied science at the University of California, Davis, and a consultant with the Institute for Scientific Computing Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Kawasaki was recognized for his “contribution to our understanding of dynamic phenomena in condensed matter systems, in particular the mode-coupling theory of fluids near criticality, and nonlinear problems, such as critical phenomena in sheared fluids and phase separation kinetics.” Having retired in March from Chubu University in Japan as a professor of natural sciences and mathematics, Kawasaki currently is spending a year with Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Ulam Scholar.