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News from ICTP 87 - Dateline
Awards, Awards and Awards
Arun Jayannavar, who won the 1996 ICTP Prize, recently received the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Award, which is the highest honor the Indian government gives to young scientists working mainly in India. Oxford University professor Sir Robert May, a three time lecturer at ICTP courses in mathematical ecology, is one of the recipients of the 1998 Balzan Foundation Prize. The prize, which is sponsored by the Italian and Swiss Balzan Foundation, is given to individuals or institutions for their efforts to promote peace. Francis K. Allotey, a member of the ICTP Scientific Council since 1995, is a recipient of the first World Bank-International Monetary Fund Africa Club award, granted to distinguished African-born scientists. Zhou Guangzhao, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and member of the ICTP Scientific Council since 1993, was the winner of the 1998 Wick Medal, which he received for his outstanding contributions to increasing our knowledge of subnuclear forces. ICTP Director, Miguel A. Virasoro, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is one of 147 new fellows and 22 honorary foreign members chosen in the field of physical sciences.
Four of the five 1998 Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Chemistry are no strangers to the ICTP. US-born Robert B. Laughlin of Stanford University has visited the ICTP four times, including last year at the Third Trieste Conference on Statistical Field Theory. German-born Horst L. Stoermer, on the faculty of Columbia University in New York and staff of Lucent Technologies (formerly Bell Laboratories) in New Jersey, has spoken at three ICTP symposia, including the Centre's 25th Anniversary Conference on Frontiers in Physics, High Technology and Mathematics. He will return to the ICTP this July for the First Stig Lundqvist Research Conference on Advancing Frontiers in Condensed Matter Physics. And Chinese-born Daniel C. Tsui, who teaches at Princeton University, tutored at the Symposium on Frontiers in Condensed Matter Physics in 1990. Meanwhile, Austrian-born Walter Kohn, who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with UK-born John A. Pople of Northwestern University, was a frequent visitor to the ICTP between 1985 and 1993. Kohn is a professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
In still another demonstration of the ICTP's reach, one of the four recipients of the 1998 Fields Medal was Maxim Kontsevich, who spoke at the ICTP Trieste Conference on S-Duality and Mirror Symmetry in 1995. The Fields Medal, given once every four years, is the highest honor bestowed in mathematics.
Nitin Nitsure, a reader in the School of Mathematics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India, is the winner of the 1997 ICTP Prize. Nitsure was awarded the prize for his internationally recognized work in algebraic geometry. Marking a trend that has become increasingly common, Nitsure received his undergraduate and advanced degrees in his home country of India, at the University of Poona and the University of Mumbai. The official award ceremony took place last October.
News from ICTP has won Best of Newsletters and was named a finalist for Best of Show in the MerComm's Mercury Award Competition. The newsletter was chosen among more than total 1,000 entries. Previous winners of MerComm awards have included Boeing Aerospace, the Discovery Channel, Turner Broadcasting and the Electric Power Research Institute. The awards ceremony took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in late January.
By day, Lawrence M. Krauss is an internationally renowned particle physicist and cosmologist, who chairs the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. That's why Krauss was invited to lecture at ICTP's Workshop on the Physics of Relic Neutrinos, held last fall in Trieste. At the workshop, he analyzed the preliminary results of the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan, which showed for the first time that neutrinos, the world's most elusive subatomic particles, oscillate and, therefore, have mass (see News from ICTP, Summer 1998).
By night, however, Krauss is an internationally renowned author widely known for his bestseller, The Physics of Star Trek, inspired by the famous television and movie saga. Using Star Trek as a hook to entice readers, young and old, Krauss explains such exotic concepts--and perhaps fantasies--as warp drives, antimatter and teleportation.
"In my opinion," Krauss noted in an interview with the editors of News from ICTP, "the world of Star Trek is a marvellous laboratory in which you can explore the physics of the entire universe. Many high school science teachers and college professors," he adds, "have used my book to lure their students into wonders of science."
Krauss's most recent book, Beyond Star Trek, offers a scientific analysis of such recent cult movies as Independence Day and The X-Files. He hopes that too will be another bestseller. In the meantime, he has no intention of leaving his day job. So, we can expect to see him back at the ICTP in the near future.
What will tomorrow's weather be like in Lagos, Ibadan and Abuja? That's a question that some 40 million Nigerians ask each evening when they tune into Nigeria's national television network at 7 and 9 p.m. The answer is often provided by Ernest A. Afiesimama, one of three weather "presenters" who work for Nigeria's Central Forecast Office. Within the past six months, Afiesimama has visited the ICTP twice, first to attend the Conference on Warm Climates in the Tropics, held last summer, and then to participate in the Course on Mediterranean Sea(s) Circulation and Ecosystem Functioning, held last fall.
"My experience at the ICTP," Afiesimama explains, "has not only helped to sharpen my weather forecasting skills but has put me in touch with weather and climate experts from around the world." Nigeria, he goes on to say, "has a number of well-trained meteorologists, but we often find it difficult to keep current in a field that is being rapidly transformed by advances in computer modelling."
That's why Afiesimama hopes to stay in close contact with the ICTP's new Physics of Weather and Climate Group. "We think that the Group has a great deal to offer us, especially when it comes to gaining access and training in the use of regional models." By providing a clearer look at weather patterns over small areas--say 25 square kilometres--such models could dramatically improve weather forecasting in Nigeria and other developing countries.
As for his "nightly gig" as a weather presenter with one of the largest audiences in the world, Afiesimama notes that the job has its ups and downs. "It's fun to be recognised by so many people except, of course, when you predict sunny skies and it pours--or, as sometimes happens in Nigeria, when you predict heavy rains and the sun keeps bearing down. I just have to keep telling people I don't make the weather, I just report it--based on the best information available."
From Lagos to Los Angeles, inaccurate forecasts are apparently an occupational hazard faced by all weather forecasters.
Searching for Life on Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. That was the topic of Tobias Owen's public lecture, organized by the ICTP, which took place at the Interpreters' School of Trieste University last fall. Owen is a well-known astrophysicist from the University of Hawaii, who has served as part of the research team for several interplanetary space programs sponsored by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), including the Viking, Voyager, Galileo and Cassini missions. Owen highlighted the compelling progress that scientists have made in two areas of research. The first is laboratory replication of the possible first steps in molecular evolution, marked by the creation of nucleic acids, proteins and sugars. The second is the search for biological evidence of primitive forms of life on other celestial bodies, including planets, meteorites and comets. Some 150 people from Trieste and the surrounding region attended Owen's lecture.
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