Wolf, Japan prizes to be presented

Achievements in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, among other fields, will be honored by the Wolf Foundation, which has awarded a half-dozen prizes in the sciences annually since 1978. Six of this year’s award recipients do physics-related work.

Two of those recipients have also been recognized by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan, which administers the Japan Prize.

The Wolf physics prize will be shared by Albert Fert, professor of physics at Université de Paris–Sud and scientific director at the CNRS/Thales Joint Physics Unit in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, a research scientist at the Institute for Solid State Research in the Jülich Research Center in Germany. They will receive the award, according to the citation, “for their independent discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon (GMR), thereby launching a new field of research and applications known as spintronics, which utilizes the spin of the electron to store and transport information.” GMR revolutionized the magnetic recording industry by allowing “an enormous increase in the storage capacscodeity and reading speed of magnetic hard-disk drives,” the foundation said.

For their work, Fert and Grünberg were also named co-recipients of the Japan Prize for 2007 in the category of Innovative Devices Inspired by Basic Research. “The new paradigm of spin-electronics pioneered by Prof. A. Fert and Prof. Dr. P. Grünberg triggered a great advance in basic research that linked the electrical transport and the magnetic phenomenon, as well as in innovative applied research such as nonvolatile memory making use of the finding,” the Japan Prize award committee said. The prize consists of a certificate of merit and a commemorative medal in addition to a cash award of ¥50 million ($415 000), which the two will share. The award will be presented in a Tokyo ceremony in April 2008.

Jointly receiving the Wolf mathematics prize will be Harry Furstenberg and Stephen J. Smale. Furstenberg, a mathematics professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was cited “for his profound contributions to ergodic theory, probability, topological dynamics, analysis on symmetric spacscodees, and homogenous flows.” The foundation called him “one of the great masters of probability theory, ergodic theory, and topological dynamics.”

Smale, professor emeritus in the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley, will be honored “for his groundbreaking contributions that have played a fundamental role in shaping differential topology, dynamical systems, mathematical economics, and other subjects in mathematics,” according to the citation. The foundation cited Smale’s proof of the Poincaré conjecture for dimensions bigger or equal to five “as one of the great mathematical achievements of the 20th century.”

The Wolf chemistry prize will be jointly awarded to George Feher, a professor in the physics department at UC San Diego, and Ada Yonath, the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professor of Structural Biology and director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly, both at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. They received the honor “for [their] ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis,” according to the award citation. Feher’s work has applications to biophysics and biochemistry, while Yonath has made notable achievements in protein crystallography.

The Wolf Foundation, based in Herzliyya Pituach, Israel, will present the awards in May during a Jerusalem ceremony. Each prize carries a $100 000 purse.