2020 Dirac Medal and Prize Ceremony

ICTP celebrates the 2020 Dirac Medal and Prize winners this week, honoring André Neveu of University of Montpellier, Pierre Ramond of University of Florida, and Miguel Virasoro of Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento – "for their pioneering contributions to the inception and formulation of string theory which introduced new Bosonic and Fermionic symmetries into physics." Read the announcement and the full citation of their win.

The 2020 Dirac Medal and Prize Ceremony will take place as a mixed online and in presence event on Friday 22 October 2021 at 14.00 CET. You can register here to attend online, and the Ceremony will also be livestreamed on ICTP's YouTube and Facebook pages. All are welcome to attend.

The rich programme for this event includes an introduction from Jeff Harvey of the University of Chicago, USA. Following this, Dirac Medal Winner André Neveu from the University of Montpellier in France will give a talk on "Perturbatively conserved higher nonlocal charges of free-surface deep-water gravity waves".

Fellow Winner Pierre Ramond from the University of Florida in the USA will then give a talk on "Following Dirac's Footsteps". After these two talks, an In Memoriam event series of remarks will honor the late Dirac Medal Winner Miguel Virasoro, with invited speakers Giorgio Parisi, Gabriele Veneziano, Daniele Amati, and Atish Dabholkar highlighting the Virasoro's scientific work.

First awarded in 1985, ICTP's Dirac Medal is given in honour of P.A.M. Dirac, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century and a staunch friend of the Centre. It is awarded every year on Dirac's birthday, 8 August, to scientists who have made significant contributions to theoretical physics. Recipients of ICTP’s Dirac Medal join a list of Medallists comprising the world’s top physicists, many of whom have proceeded to win Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals or Wolf Prizes. An international committee of distinguished scientists selects the winners from a list of nominated candidates.

This year, the Ceremony is an integral part of the ICTP School on Superstring Theory and Related Topics (smr 3629) which runs from 18-22 October 2021. While he is in Trieste, Parisi will be giving a Joint ICTP-SISSA Colloquium, the first public talk by Professor Parisi since the announcement of his 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics award, which will take place on 22 October at 11:00 CET.