ICTP Prize Winner 2006

The 2006 ICTP Prize, in honour of Gian-Carlo Wick, is awarded to Rajesh Gopakumar, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad, India.

Rajesh Gopakumar is a highly accomplished string theorist whose research is very influential and encompasses many different areas of string theory and field theory.

His important contributions include papers on large N gauge theories, solitons in noncommutative field theories and topological string theory. His work on the latter topic with Vafa inspired the theory of Gopakumar-Vafa invariants in mathematics. More recently he has pioneered a program to understand the free field theory limit of the correspondence between quantum field theories and gravitational systems in one higher dimension.