ICTP Prize Winner 1993

The ICTP Prize in honour of J. Robert Schrieffer (Nobel Laureate in Physics 1972, USA) in the fields of Solid State, Atomic and Molecular Physics was awarded to Deepak Dhar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, India, for his outstanding work on a class of complex systems involving self-organized criticality and phase transition. Deepak Dhar has made an outstanding contribution to our understanding of a class of complex physical problems involving geometrical, numerical, dynamical and statistical mechanical randomness. This includes his work on directed percolation lattice animal statistics and combinatorics, random walks on fractals, spin glasses, self-organized criticality of auomaton models, and equilibrium phase transitions. His exact solution of the Abelian Sandpile Model of self-organized criticality and of the directed-site animals enumeration in three dimensions marks a notable advance in our understanding of this class of complex system.