…and the biggest prize goes to: theoretical Physicists, including Ashoke Sen!
Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad
Allahabad: Forget cricket, Indians! Forget dancing, singing or Crorepati contests. Here’s the chance to win big money – thanks to Yuri Milner! Big money, but not quick money! Tell your friends, cousins, and friend’s friends to stop wasting hopes on lotteries, draws, quick rich schemes and stare hard and long at the universe, looking for mysteries where others see all the obvious stuff!
According to reports, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner inaugurated his new prize program for fundamental physics today with a big bang: awards of $3 million each to nine of the world’s best-known theorists.
Among the honorees are MIT’s Alan Guth and Stanford’s Andrei Linde, who developed the theory of cosmic inflation that currently stands as the most widely accepted model for the expansion of the universe.
In a Stanford news release, Linde said he could hardly believe what he was hearing when a telephone caller told him about the prize. At first, he told the caller that he’d have to think about accepting the money.
“Then I realized that I was making the most stupid joke of my life, and said that I would of course accept it,” he said. “It’s a huge prize. It’s unbelievable.”
The newly minted Fundamental Physics Prize is now the world’s richest academic award, eclipsing the $1.2 million Nobel Prize as well as the $1.7 million Templeton Prize for science and spirituality.
Milner, 50, is himself a trained physicist who began his business career as an banking specialist and built up his fortune through a string of Internet investments, including stakes in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. This year, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion.
The $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize is to be awarded annually by the nonprofit Milner Foundation to recognize “transformative advances in the field.” The $3 million prize may also be given at any time outside the formal nomination process “in exceptional cases,” according to today’s announcement from the foundation.
“I hope the new prize will bring long overdue recognition to the greatest minds working in the field of fundamental physics, and if this helps encourage young people to be inspired by science, I will be deeply gratified,” Milner said in the announcement.
Promising junior researchers will be eligible for a different $100,000 annual award known as the New Horizons in Physics Prize.
To kick off the program, nine $3 million prizes were awarded today, and the nine recipients were invited to help select future honorees. In addition to Guth and Linde, the recipients include four string theorists at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten. The three other honorees are Caltech’s Alexei Kitaev, who focuses on quantum computing; Russian mathematician Maxim Kontsevich; and Indian string theorist Ashoke Sen.
Linde said he’d have to devote some serious study to his $3 million prize.
“For people who do not have a strong financial background, deciding what to do with this money is equally complicated as deciding what to do with the formation of the universe,” he joked.
[Courtesy: NBCnews.com]
Brief Biography:
Ashoke Sen, FRS (born 1956) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He has made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensationon such branes.
Prof Ashoke Sen
His description of rolling tachyons[3] has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory. One of his most recent contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates for black holes in string theory. Of his nearly 200 research papers, as many as 47 papers have over 100 citations each.
Sen received his bachelor’s of science degree in 1975 from Calcutta University, and his master’s three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University, where he graduated in 1982, subsequently spending the next three years as a post-doc at Fermilab and another two and a half at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). In March 1988, he moved back to India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Since 1995 he has been a full professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute. Between 1998 and 2003, Sen visited the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, U.K., as Rothschild Visiting Professor, and, between 2004 and 2005, was at MIT as Morningstar Visiting Professor. He is married to Dr. Sumathi Rao, a condensed matter physicist at HRI.
[Bio, courtesy Wikipedia]