The Boltzmann Medal (or Boltzmann Award) is a prize awarded to physicists that obtain new results concerning statistical mechanics; it is named after the celebrated physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. The Boltzmann Medal is awarded once every three years by the Commission on Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, during the STATPHYS conference.[1][2]
The award consists of a gilded medal; its front carries the inscription Ludwig Boltzmann, 1844–1906.
All the winners are influential physicists or mathematicians whose contribution to statistical physics have been relevant in the past decades. Institution with multiple recipients are Sapienza University of Rome (3) and École Normale Supérieure, Cornell University, University of Cambridge and Princeton University (2).
The Medal cannot be awarded to scientist who already has been laureate of a Nobel Prize. Two recipients of the Boltzmann Medal have gone to win the Nobel Prize in Physics: Kenneth G. Wilson (1982) and Giorgio Parisi (2021).
| Year | Laureates | Institution | For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1975 | Kenneth G. Wilson[3] | Cornell University | |
| 1977 | Ryogo Kubo[3] | University of Tokyo | "his work in the field of fluctuation theory." |
| 1980 | Rodney J. Baxter[4][5] | Australian National University | |
| 1983 | Michael E. Fisher[6] | University of Maryland, College Park | |
| 1986 | David Ruelle[7] | Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques | |
| Yakov G. Sinai[7] | Moscow State University | ||
| 1989 | Leo Kadanoff[8] | University of Chicago | |
| 1992 | Joel Lebowitz[9] | Rutgers University | "his many important contributions to equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and for his leadership role in the statistical physics community." |
| Giorgio Parisi[9] | Sapienza University of Rome | "his fundamental contributions to statistical physics, and particularly for his solution of the mean field theory of spin glasses." | |
| 1995 | Sam F. Edwards[10] | University of Cambridge | |
| 1998 | Elliott Lieb[11] | Princeton University | |
| Benjamin Widom[11] | Cornell University | "his illuminating studies of the statistical mechanics of fluids and fluid mixtures and their interfacial properties, especially his clear and general formulation of scaling hypotheses for the equation of state and surface tensions of fluids near critical points." | |
| 2001 | Berni Alder[12] | University of California at Davis | “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.” |
| Kyozi Kawasaki[12] | Chubu University | “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." | |
| 2004 | E.G.D. Cohen[13] | Rockefeller University | “fundamental contributions to nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, including the development of a theory of transport phenomena in dense gases, and the characterization of measures and fluctuations in non-equilibrium stationary states.” |
| H. Eugene Stanley[13][14] | Boston University | "influential contributions to several areas of statistical physics, including the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena in spin systems and the percolation problem, and the application of these ideas to interpret the anomalous properties of liquid water." | |
| 2007 | Kurt Binder[15] | University of Mainz | |
| Giovanni Gallavotti[16] | Sapienza University of Rome | ||
| 2010 | John Cardy[17] | University of Oxford | |
| Bernard Derrida[18] | École Normale Supérieure | ||
| 2013 | Giovanni Jona-Lasinio[19] | Sapienza University of Rome | "his seminal contributions to spontaneous symmetry breaking in particle physics and the theory of non-equilibrium fluctuations." |
| Harry Swinney[19] | University of Texas at Austin | "his ingenious and challenging experiments which have had a large impact on many areas of statistical physics." | |
| 2016 | Daan Frenkel[20] | University of Cambridge | "seminal contributions to the statistical-mechanical understanding of the kinetics, self-assembly and phase behaviour of soft matter." |
| Yves Pomeau[21] | University of Arizona and École Normale Supérieure | "key contributions to the Statistical Physics of non-equilibrium phenomena in general. And, in particular, for developing our modern understanding of fluid mechanics, instabilities, pattern formation and chaos." | |
| 2019 | Herbert Spohn[22] | Technical University Munich | |
| 2022 | Deepak Dhar[23] | Tata Institute of Fundamental Research | "his seminal contributions in the field of statistical physics, including exact solutions of self-organised criticality models, interfacial growth, universal long-time relaxation in disordered magnetic systems, exact solutions in percolation and cluster counting problems and definition of spectral dimension of fractals." |
| John J. Hopfield[23] | Cornell University | "extending the boundaries of statistical physics to encompass the phenomena of life, from kinetic proofreading in the transmission of information at the molecular level to the dynamics of neural networks creating a new language for thinking about computation in the brain." |