The Humboldt Prize
Encyclopedia
The Humboldt Prize, also known as the Humboldt Research Award, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
to internationally renowned scientist
s and scholars, and is currently valued at € 60,000 with the possibility of further support during the prize winner's life. Up to one hundred such awards are granted each year. Nominations must be submitted by established academics in Germany.
The award is named after the late Prussia
n naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt
.
, Serge Daan
, Daniel Gianola, Hendrikus Granzier, Bert Hölldobler
, Sergej Nedospasov, Hans Othmer, Thomas Dyer Seeley, Günter P. Wagner
, and Rüdiger Wehner.
Chemistry: Anthony J. Arduengo III, Paul Josef Crutzen, Robert F. Curl, John Bennett Fenn, Walter Gilbert
, Robert H. Grubbs
, Narayan Hosmane
, Jean-Marie Lehn
, Rudolph Marcus, James Cullen Martin
, Debashis Mukherjee
, John Anthony Pople, Julius Rebek
, Richard R. Schrock
, Peter Schwerdtfeger
, Oktay Sinanoğlu
, Keisuke Suzuki
, Thomas Zemb, and Ahmed H. Zewail.
Computer Science: Michael Fellows
, Leonid Levin
Economics: Gerard Debreu
, Hal Varian
Linguistics: Matthew S. Dryer
Management: Timothy M. Devinney
Mathematics:
Dmitri Anosov, Spencer J. Bloch, Victor Guillemin
, Toshiyuki Kobayashi
, Robert Langlands
, Benoît Mandelbrot
, Arnold Mandell, Grigory Margulis
, Curtis T. McMullen
, Alexander Merkurjev
, John Milnor
, Teimuraz Pirashvili, Shayle R. Searle
, Elias M. Stein
, Anatoly Vershik
, Ernest Borisovich Vinberg
Shing-Tung Yau
, and Marc Yor
.
Medicine: Fritz Albert Lipmann
, Stanley B. Prusiner
Philosophy: Colin Allen
, Panagiotis Kondylis
, Michael Friedman
, Jeff Malpas
, John Perry
, R. Jay Wallace
.
Physics:
Girish Agarwal
,
Nicolaas Bloembergen
,
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
,
Steven Chu
,
Predrag Cvitanović
,
Hans Dehmelt,
Durmus A. Demir
,
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
,
Roy J. Glauber
,
Chris Greene,
John L. Hall
,
Theodor W. Hänsch,
Robert Hofstadter
,
Kyozi Kawasaki
,
Jihn E. Kim,
Masatoshi Koshiba
,
Herbert Kroemer
,
Jagdish Mehra,
Rabindra Mohapatra,
Pran Nath
,
Holger Bech Nielsen
,
Hirosi Ooguri
,
Valery Pokrovsky
,
Alfred Saupe
,
Arthur L. Schawlow,
Julian Schwinger
,
Clifford G. Shull,
Ching W. Tang
.
and
M. Suhail Zubairy
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is a foundation set-up by the government of the Federal Republic and funded by the German Foreign Office, the Ministry of Education and Research, the Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and others for the promotion of international co-operation...
to internationally renowned scientist
Scientist
A scientist in a broad sense is one engaging in a systematic activity to acquire knowledge. In a more restricted sense, a scientist is an individual who uses the scientific method. The person may be an expert in one or more areas of science. This article focuses on the more restricted use of the word...
s and scholars, and is currently valued at € 60,000 with the possibility of further support during the prize winner's life. Up to one hundred such awards are granted each year. Nominations must be submitted by established academics in Germany.
The award is named after the late Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
n naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt was a German naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt...
.
Past winners
Biology: Günter BlobelGünter Blobel
-Biography:Blobel was born in Waltersdorf in the Prussian Province of Lower Silesia. In January 1945 his family fled from native Silesia from the advancing Red Army. On their way to the West they passed through the beautiful old city of Dresden, which left deep impressions in the young boy...
, Serge Daan
Serge Daan
Serge Daan is a Dutch scientist, known for his significant contributions to the field of Chronobiology.-Early life and education:Serge Daan was born in a wind mill, grew up in the Dutch countryside, and went to high school in Deventer...
, Daniel Gianola, Hendrikus Granzier, Bert Hölldobler
Bert Hölldobler
Bert Hölldobler is a German behavioral biologist and Sociobiologist whose primary study subjects are social insects and in particular ants. He is a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work on The Ants with Edward O. Wilson...
, Sergej Nedospasov, Hans Othmer, Thomas Dyer Seeley, Günter P. Wagner
Günter P. Wagner
Günter P. Wagner is Alison Richard Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at Yale University, and head of the Wagner Lab.-Education and training:...
, and Rüdiger Wehner.
Chemistry: Anthony J. Arduengo III, Paul Josef Crutzen, Robert F. Curl, John Bennett Fenn, Walter Gilbert
Walter Gilbert
Walter Gilbert is an American physicist, biochemist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.-Biography:Gilbert was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 21, 1932...
, Robert H. Grubbs
Robert H. Grubbs
Robert Howard Grubbs is an American chemist and Nobel laureate.As he noted in his official Nobel Prize autobiography, "In some places, my birthplace is listed as Calvert City and in others Possum Trot [NB: both in Marshall County]...
, Narayan Hosmane
Narayan Hosmane
Narayan S. Hosmane is an Indian-born cancer research scientist who made the featured article in NRI Achievers magazine and is currently distinguished research professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the inaugural board of trustees professor at Northern Illinois University, Dekalb. He received...
, Jean-Marie Lehn
Jean-Marie Lehn
Jean-Marie Lehn is a French chemist. He received the Nobel Prize together with Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen in 1987 for his work in Chemistry, particularly his synthesis of the cryptands...
, Rudolph Marcus, James Cullen Martin
James Cullen Martin
James Cullen Martin was an American chemist. He specialized in organic chemistry and main group element chemistry with an emphasis on physical organic chemistry....
, Debashis Mukherjee
Debashis Mukherjee
Debashis Mukherjee is one of the pioneers of Modern Theoretical Chemistry, well-known for his research in the fields of molecular many body theory, theoretical spectroscopy, finite temperature non-perturbative many body theories. Mukherjee has been the first to develop and implement a class of...
, John Anthony Pople, Julius Rebek
Julius Rebek
Julius Rebek, Jr. is a Hungarian-born American chemist and expert on molecular self-assembly.Rebek was born in Beregszasz , Hungary in 1944 and lived in Austria from 1945 to 1949. In 1949 he and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Kansas. Rebek graduated from the University...
, Richard R. Schrock
Richard R. Schrock
Richard Royce Schrock is an American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized for his contributions to the metathesis reaction used in organic chemistry.-Biography:...
, Peter Schwerdtfeger
Peter Schwerdtfeger
Peter Schwerdtfeger is the Head of the Centre for Theoretical Physics and Chemistry at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. He is a recipient of the New Zealand Hector Memorial Medal, and the Humboldt Prize.-Sources:*http://ctcp.massey.ac.nz/~schwerd...
, Oktay Sinanoğlu
Oktay Sinanoglu
Oktay Sinanoğlu is a Turkish scientist specializing in theoretical chemistry and molecular biology. In May 1963 at the age of 29 , he was full professor at Yale University...
, Keisuke Suzuki
Keisuke Suzuki
is a Japanese politician who is a member of the Liberal Democratic Party serving in the House of Representatives.A native of Tokyo, he graduated from the University of Tokyo and then worked at the Ministry of Finance. He was elected for the first time in the 2005 general election.- References :...
, Thomas Zemb, and Ahmed H. Zewail.
Computer Science: Michael Fellows
Michael Fellows
Michael Ralph Fellows is Professor at Charles Darwin University, Australia, and Director of the Parameterized Complexity Research Unit . Fellows is recognized as one of the founders of Parameterized complexity, a complexity framework that uses structure in hard problems for the design and...
, Leonid Levin
Leonid Levin
-External links:* at Boston University....
Economics: Gerard Debreu
Gerard Debreu
Gérard Debreu was a French economist and mathematician, who also came to have United States citizenship. Best known as a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began work in 1962, he won the 1983 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.-Biography:His father was the...
, Hal Varian
Hal Varian
Hal Ronald Varian is an economist specializing in microeconomics and information economics. He is the Chief Economist at Google and he holds the title of emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he was founding dean of the School of Information...
Linguistics: Matthew S. Dryer
Management: Timothy M. Devinney
Timothy M. Devinney
Timothy M. Devinney is an Australian-American management scholar and a Professor of Strategy at the School of Business, University of Technology, Sydney....
Mathematics:
Dmitri Anosov, Spencer J. Bloch, Victor Guillemin
Victor Guillemin
Victor William Guillemin is a mathematician, a leader in the field of symplectic geometry, who has also made fundamental contributions to the fields of microlocal analysis, spectral theory, and mathematical physics...
, Toshiyuki Kobayashi
Toshiyuki Kobayashi
is a Japanese mathematicianknown for his original work in the field of Lie theory, and inparticular for thetheory of discontinuous groupsand the application of geometric analysis to representation theory...
, Robert Langlands
Robert Langlands
Robert Phelan Langlands is a mathematician, best known as the founder of the Langlands program. He is an emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study...
, Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoît Mandelbrot
Benoît B. Mandelbrot was a French American mathematician. Born in Poland, he moved to France with his family when he was a child...
, Arnold Mandell, Grigory Margulis
Grigory Margulis
Gregori Aleksandrovich Margulis is a Russian mathematician known for his far-reaching work on lattices in Lie groups, and the introduction of methods from ergodic theory into diophantine approximation. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1978 and a Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2005, becoming the...
, Curtis T. McMullen
Curtis T. McMullen
Curtis Tracy McMullen is Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998 for his work in complex dynamics, hyperbolic geometry and Teichmüller theory....
, Alexander Merkurjev
Alexander Merkurjev
Alexander Merkurjev is a Russian-born American mathematician, who has made major contributions to the field of algebra. Currently Merkurjev is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.-Awards and distinctions:...
, John Milnor
John Milnor
John Willard Milnor is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, K-theory and dynamical systems. He won the Fields Medal in 1962, the Wolf Prize in 1989, and the Abel Prize in 2011. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University...
, Teimuraz Pirashvili, Shayle R. Searle
Shayle R. Searle
Shayle Robert Searle Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Biological Statistics at Cornell University. He is a leader in the field of linear and mixed models in statistics, and has published widely on the topics of linear models, mixed models, and variance component estimation.Searle is one of the first...
, Elias M. Stein
Elias M. Stein
Elias Menachem Stein is a mathematician and a leading figure in the field of harmonic analysis. He is the Albert Baldwin Dod Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.-Biography:...
, Anatoly Vershik
Anatoly Vershik
Anatoly Moiseevich Vershik is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He is most famous for his joint work with Sergey V. Kerov on representations of infinite symmetric groups and applications to the longest increasing subsequences....
, Ernest Borisovich Vinberg
Ernest Borisovich Vinberg
Ernest Borisovich Vinberg is a Russian mathematician, who works on discrete subgroups of Lie groups and representation theory. He introduced Vinberg's algorithm. He is a recipient of the Humboldt Prize.-References:*...
Shing-Tung Yau
Shing-Tung Yau
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese American mathematician working in differential geometry. He was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province, China into a family of scholars from Jiaoling, Guangdong Province....
, and Marc Yor
Marc Yor
Marc Yor is a French mathematician well-known for his work on stochastic processes, especially properties of semimartingales, Brownian motion and other Lévy processes, the Bessel processes, and their applications to mathematical finance...
.
Medicine: Fritz Albert Lipmann
Fritz Albert Lipmann
Fritz Albert Lipmann FRS was a German-American biochemist and a co-discoverer in 1945 of coenzyme A. For this, together with other research on coenzyme A, he was awarded half the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953 .Lipmann was born in Königsberg, Germany to a Jewish family.Lipmann...
, Stanley B. Prusiner
Stanley B. Prusiner
Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. Currently the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco . Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein...
Philosophy: Colin Allen
Colin Allen
Colin Allen is an English blues drummer and songwriter.-Career:Allen took up drums at the age of 18, playing initially with local jazz musician in Dorset...
, Panagiotis Kondylis
Panagiotis Kondylis
Panagiotis Kondylis , was a Greek writer, translator and publications manager who principally wrote in German, in addition to translating most of his work into Greek...
, Michael Friedman
Michael Friedman
Michael Friedman may refer to:*Michael Jan Friedman, author*Mike Friedman, cyclist*Michael Friedman *Michael Friedman -See also:*Michael Freedman, mathematician*Michael Freeman...
, Jeff Malpas
Jeff Malpas
Jeff Malpas is an Australian philosopher, currently Professor ofPhilosophy at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Tasmania. Known forhis work across the analytic‚ and continental‚ traditions, Malpas has...
, John Perry
John Perry (philosopher)
John R. Perry is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He has made significant contributions to areas of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind...
, R. Jay Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
R. Jay Wallace is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His area of specialization is moral philosophy. He is most noted for his work on practical reason, moral psychology, and meta-ethics.-Biography:...
.
Physics:
Girish Agarwal
Girish Agarwal
Girish Saran Agarwal, FRS is the physicist specialising in quantum optics. He currently holds the Noble Foundation Chair and serves as Regents Professor in the Department of Physics of Oklahoma State University.-Life:...
,
Nicolaas Bloembergen
Nicolaas Bloembergen
Nicolaas Bloembergen is a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate.He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Leiden in 1948; while pursuing his PhD at Harvard, Bloembergen also worked part-time as a graduate research assistant for Edward Mills Purcell at the MIT Radiation Laboratory...
,
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS ) was an Indian origin American astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for key discoveries that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars...
,
Steven Chu
Steven Chu
Steven Chu is an American physicist and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. Chu is known for his research at Bell Labs in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and...
,
Predrag Cvitanović
Predrag Cvitanovic
Predrag Cvitanović, is currently an endowed Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is highly regarded for his work in nonlinear dynamics, particularly his contributions to periodic orbit theory...
,
Hans Dehmelt,
Durmus A. Demir
Durmus A. Demir
Durmus A. Demir is a Turkish theoretical physicist and a dean of the Graduate School of Engineering and Sciences at the Izmir Institute of Technology where he is the ex-chair of the Physics Department...
,
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
Pierre-Gilles de Gennes was a French physicist and the Nobel Prize laureate in physics in 1991.-Biography:...
,
Roy J. Glauber
Roy J. Glauber
Roy Jay Glauber is an American theoretical physicist. He is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona...
,
Chris Greene,
John L. Hall
John L. Hall
John Lewis "Jan" Hall is an American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics. He shared one half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch for his work in precision spectroscopy.-Biography:...
,
Theodor W. Hänsch,
Robert Hofstadter
Robert Hofstadter
Robert Hofstadter was an American physicist. He was the joint winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons."-Biography :Born in New York City, he entered City...
,
Kyozi Kawasaki
Kyozi Kawasaki
is a Japanese physicist. His research interests include chemical physics and statistical mechanics. In 2001, Kawasaki was awarded the Boltzmann Medal for "his contribution to our understanding of dynamic phenomena in condensed matter systems, in particular the mode-coupling theory of fluids near...
,
Jihn E. Kim,
Masatoshi Koshiba
Masatoshi Koshiba
is a Japanese physicist. He jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002.He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1951 and received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Rochester, New York, in 1955...
,
Herbert Kroemer
Herbert Kroemer
Herbert Kroemer , a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor, setting the stage...
,
Jagdish Mehra,
Rabindra Mohapatra,
Pran Nath
Pran Nath
Pran Nath is a theoretical physicist working at Northeastern University, with research focus in elementary particle physics. He holds a Matthews Distinguished University Professor chair.-Research:...
,
Holger Bech Nielsen
Holger Bech Nielsen
Holger Bech Nielsen is a Danish theoretical physicist, professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, where he started studying physics in 1961....
,
Hirosi Ooguri
Hirosi Ooguri
is a theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology. He is a leading theorist in high energy physics and works at the interface of elementary particle physics, string theory, and related mathematics....
,
Valery Pokrovsky
Valery Pokrovsky
Valery Pokrovsky is a Soviet and Russian physicist. He is a member ofthe Landau Institute in Chernogolovka nearMoscow in Russia and a professor for Theoretical Physics at Texas A&M University....
,
Alfred Saupe
Alfred Saupe
-Biography:Alfred Saupe was a German Physicist born in Badenweiler, who laid groundbreaking work in the area of liquid crystal studies....
,
Arthur L. Schawlow,
Julian Schwinger
Julian Schwinger
Julian Seymour Schwinger was an American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order.Schwinger is recognized as one of the...
,
Clifford G. Shull,
Ching W. Tang
Ching W. Tang
Ching W. Tang, is a Hong Kong - American Physical Chemist. He was born in Yuen Long, Hong Kong in 1947. Tang currently is the Doris Johns Cherry Professor in the Chemical Engineering Department, University of Rochester . He also has joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and the...
.
and
M. Suhail Zubairy