Shaw Prize Foundation Announces Shaw Laureates for 2008
Shaw Prize Foundation announces Shaw Laureates for 2008
HONG KONG, June 10 (Xinhua) — The three categories of Shaw Prize for 2008, each worth a million U.S. dollars, went to six scientists from Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia, respectively, the Hong Kong-based Shaw Prize Foundation announced Tuesday.
The Shaw Prize is an international award to honor individuals who are currently active in their respective fields and who have achieved distinguished and significant advances, who have made outstanding contributions in culture and the arts, or who in other domains have achieved excellence.
The Shaw Prize for 2008 consists of three annual wards: The Prize in Astronomy, the Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Prize in Mathematical Sciences.
The Astronomy category went to Reinhard Genzel, for “his outstanding contribution in demonstrating that the Milky Way contains a supermassive black hole at its center.” He was 56 and currently managing director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and a professor in physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1969, Donald Lynden-Bell and Martin Rees suggested that the Milky Way might contain a supermassive black hole. Genzel obtained compelling evidence for this by developing state-of-the-art instruments and observing the Galactic Center for years.
The Life Science and Medicine prize was split between Shinya Yamanaka from Japan and the team of Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell from the United Kingdom, for their recent pivotal innovations in reversing the process of cell differentiation in mammals.
The scientists were commended because the phenomenon “advances our knowledge of developmental biology and holds great promise for the treatment of human diseases and improvements in agriculture practices,” the prize council said in a statement.
Yamanaka, 46, is a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Science, the Kyoto University. Ian Wilmut, 64, is currently chair and director of reproductive biology at the Scottish Center for Regenerative Medicine, the University of Edinburgh, while Campbell, 54, is a professor of animal development at the University of Nottingham. Wilmut and Campbell were also known as the creator of cloned sheep Dolly.
Vladimir Arnold and Ludwig Faddeev shared the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences for “their widespread and influential contributions to Mathematical Physics.”
Arnold, 71, presently the chief scientist at Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow and a professor at the Universite Paris at Dauhpine, France, made fundamental contributions to the study of stability in dynamical systems.
Faddeev, 74, director of the Euler International Mathematical Institute, Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics, made many important contributions to quantum physics, including finding the right way to quantize the non-Abelian theory.
Past winners for the increasingly influential prize included Shiing-shen Chern, Richard Doll, P.James E. Peebles, Andrew John Wiles, David Mumford, among others.
The award presentation ceremony will be held in September.
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