Ishfaq Ahmad, Chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, visited the ICTP from 12-14 September. Ahmad met with the heads of the Centre's research and training programmes. He also visited the library and computer facilities and received a tour of the nearby synchrotron facility, Elettra. The Chairman and ...
J. William Schopf, professor of paleobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, will give a public lecture on "Ancient Life on Mars and Earth" on 20 September, at 18:00, in the Kastler Lecture Hall at the Adriatico Guesthouse. His presentation is part of the Sixth Trieste Conference on C...
For the first time in the 15-year history of the ICTP's Dirac Medal, the selection committee has chosen a woman as one of the medallists. Helen Quinn, staff scientist in theoretical physics at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Stanford, California, will share the medal with Howard Georgi, professor of physics ...
Evolutionary game theory, adaptive learning, and theories seeking to explain financial market behaviour will be the focus of discussions at the School on the Mathematics of Economics to be held from 21 August to 2 September. The School (co-sponsored by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences) repres...
Some 35 activities are listed in the Centre's preliminary 2001 Scientific Calendar that is now available on the web (http://www.ictp.trieste.it/www_users/calendar/cal2001.html). ICTP's first 2001 training and research activity, beginning 11 January, will be the Tenth International Workshop on Computational Condensed M...
Daniel Domínguez, professor of physics at Instituto Balseiro in Bariloche, Argentina, will receive the 1999 ICTP Prize on 21 July. Domínguez has been honoured for his studies of vortex dynamics in superconducting materials and Josephson junction arrays. The 1999 ICTP Prize is named in honour of Stig...
ICTP Director Miguel Virasoro and Massimo Altarelli, head of the ICTP synchrotron radiation theory group and chief executive officer and science director of Elettra (Trieste's synchrotron radiation source), were among those in attendance in Amman, Jordan, when it was officially announced that Jordan will be the n...
On 3 June, the President of Mongolia, Natsagiyn Bagabandi, will visit the ICTP to discuss areas of mutual interest and cooperation with ICTP Director Miguel Virasoro. On 12 June, Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, a Dutch-born scientist presently working at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, will spe...
Paolo Budinich, instrumental in the creation of the ICTP and for many years its deputy director, tells his story in an autobiography titled L'arcipelago delle meraviglie (The Archipelago of Wonders), published by Di Renzo Editore in Rome. Apart from his personal remembrances (Budinich was born in 1916 in Dalmatia...
The Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) has been chosen to host the secretariat of the InterAcademy Panel (IAP). The decision was made at the Conference of the World's Scientific Academies, "Transition to Sustainability in the 21st Century," held in Tokyo, Japan, in May. The purpose of the IAP, which...
Last month, ICTP Director Miguel Virasoro, Seifallah Randjbar-Daemi and Massimo Altarelli travelled to Iran to discuss ways of expanding cooperation with Iranian scientists and scientific institutions. Their journeys, in part, were a follow-up to a 1998 memorandum of understanding signed between the ICTP and the ...
M.A.S. Hikam, Indonesia's Minister of State for Research and Technology, visited the ICTP on 31 May. He was accompanied by a delegation of 10 scientific researchers and administrators. Alessandro Merola, newly appointed Italian ambassador to Indonesia, and Michele Miele, Italian advisor to the Minister of State f...
The Tenth Scientific and Technological Culture Week will be held between 22 and 28 May under the sponsorship of the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific and Technological Research. ICTP, in co-operation with Laboratorio dell'Immaginario Scientifico, will organise a series of lectures for high school students ...
Giorgio Parisi, professor of physics at the University of Rome La Sapienza, will receive the 1999 Dirac Medal at a ceremony to be held at the ICTP Main Lecture Hall on 24 May. Parisi is being honoured for his contributions to physics that have spanned a broad range of topics, including elementary particles, phase tran...
The Adriatico Guesthouse's Lower Level 1 has received a major facelift that not only puts the area in compliance with all safety regulations but makes better use of the floor space. The Kastler Lecture Hall (formerly Main Lecture Room) has a new improved look, and a small room (to be named after Stig Lundqvist) has be...
The ICTP homepage has been re-arranged. Following numerous requests for additional links that stretched the homepage's capacity, a new slightly modified format has been introduced to help make the homepage more manageable. The homepage can be viewed with any browser and has no frames, few pictures and no animated cont...
ICTP recently announced the following ICTP prizes: 2000, in mathematics (in honour of Friedrich Hirzebruch); 2001, in high energy physics (in honour of Hans Bethe, Nobel Laureate 1967); and 2002, in condensed matter physics (in honour of Philip W. Anderson, Nobel Laureate 1977). The prizes, which include a medal, a ce...
The Sesame Training Committee, which recently met at ICTP, is calling for applications from scientists and engineers from the Middle East for: (1) a cooperative research programme in which young researchers from the Middle East will join research groups in European synchrotron laboratories for intensive training (labo...
To help celebrate the UN's International Year of Peace, the ICTP Cultural Committee is organising a "Colours of Peace" happening, which is scheduled to take place on 14 April at 5:30 p.m. in the Adriatico Guesthouse, Lower Level. Sponsors include ICTP, Laboratorio dell'Immaginario Scientifico, UNESCO and UNI...
Masatoshi Koshiba, professor of physics at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Raymond Davis, professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, have been awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize for physics for their investigations of the elusive subatomic particles, neutrinos. The prize citation noted that their...
The Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) has been given the Group of 77/United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) award for 2000. The award is granted to institutions that have made significant contributions to the advancement of science and technology in the developing world. Previous recipients include the South...
ICTP Senior Associate Ghulam Murtaza has been named the first Salam Professor of Physics at Government College in Lahore, Pakistan. The chair was established by the government of Pakistan to honour the memory of ICTP founder and Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam. Murtaza, who was a pupil of Salam at Imperial College in Londo...
On 8 March, ICTP Director Miguel Virasoro opened the three-day programme, "Matematica 2000," organised by the University of Trieste's Department of Mathematics. The Director spoke on "The Modelling of Complex Systems. A New Frontier for Mathematics and Theoretical Physics"-exploring their applicati...
Stig Lundqvist, the driving force behind the creation of the Centre's Condensed Matter Group and Chairman of the ICTP Scientific Council from 1983 to 1992, died on 6 April after a long illness. He will be remembered not only for his keen scientific mind but also for his magnetic personality. Many ICTP staff members en...
The United Nations has declared the year 2000 the "International Year for a Culture of Peace." In honour of this effort, ICTP's Cultural Committee is organising a joint art exhibition open to UN-related organisations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), United Nations Educational Scienti...
Danish-born physicist Per Bak, a professor at Imperial College in London, opened ICTP's workshop on Self-Organized Criticality and Phase Transitions in Driven Systems with a lecture outlining his views on homogeneity and non-homogeneity in the universe. Bak, a frequent visitor to the Centre, is one of the founding fat...
Two recent announcements have stirred great interest among high energy theoreticians at ICTP and SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste. A series of experiments at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, have offered evidence of the existence of a new state of matter in which quarks are completely free inst...
The American Physical Society (APS) has announced that Russian academic and government research institutions may request emergency assistance for online access to APS journals. APS's actions are designed to blunt the adverse impact of the Open Society Institute's recent announcement that it was withdrawing support for...
ICTP Director Miguel Virasoro gave a brief presentation before Italy's President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi at Area Science Park on 24 February. The Director spoke about the role of international scientific institutions in Trieste and the surrounding area, noting that the historic roots of the city's thriving scientific net...
Former IAEA director general Sigvard Arne Eklund died on 30 January 2000 in Vienna. He was 89. Eklund's tenure at the IAEA began in 1961 and continued until 1981. Eklund, who was a close associate of ICTP founder Abdus Salam, played an instrumental role both in the creation of the Centre and in the shaping of the...
ICTP's Fifth Course on Mathematical Ecology will be held from 28 February to 24 March. The first three weeks of the Course will explore such topics as the ecology of populations and communities, food webs, ecosystem assessments, epidemiology and global ecology. In addition, and for the first time, a fourth week w...
The UN Security Council has chosen Hans Blix, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to be chief inspector of a new disarmament commission for Iraq. Blix served as director general of the IAEA from 1981 to 1997--a crucial period in the Agency's history marked by the increasing r...
The European Geophysical Society has awarded Giuliano Panza the Beno Gutenberg Medal. Panza, professor of seismology at the University of Trieste and head of the ICTP Structure and Non-Linear Dynamics of the Earth (SAND) programme, is being honoured for his scholarly achievements in earthquake modelling and for a...
Arbab Ali Khan, assistant professor in the Department of Electronics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, is the first recipient of the International Commission for Optics (ICO)-ICTP Award. The award, established in August 1999, is given to a young researcher who was born and continues to live and w...
A team of condensed matter physicists from the ICTP, SISSA (Scuola internazionale superiore di studi avanzati) and INFM (Istituto nazionale per la fisica della materia)--Erio Tosatti, Guido Chiarotti, Alessandro Laio and Sandro Scandolo--has applied modified computer simulations to shed new light on the composit...
Senator Luigi Granelli, a well-respected member of the Italian Parliament, died in Milan on 1 December 1999. As Minister for Scientific Research between 1983 and 1987, Granelli provided key support for the scientific community in Trieste during a critical period of growth. Granelli proved instrumental in the crea...
World-known physicist and cosmologist Dennis William Sciama died in Oxford, United Kingdom, on 18 December 1999. Since 1983, Sciama directed the astrophysics section of the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) in Trieste and served as co-organizer of many ICTP workshops and conferences. Sciam...
Iran's Ministry of Culture and Higher Education has opened an International Scientific Meetings Office (ISMO). The office represents in part the outgrowth of a memorandum of agreement that the ministry signed with ICTP in December 1998. ISMO's main responsibility will be to organize international and regional sc...
Between 15 and 18 December, a group of 20 science reporters from 12 European countries visited the ICTP and other prominent research organizations in Trieste and the surrounding area. The group was led by Paola De Paoli, president of both the European Union of Science Journalists' Associations (EUSJA) and the Ita...
The Centre's roster of scientific research and training activities for 2000 will begin 1 February with the joint INFM-ICTP School on Magnetic Properties of Condensed Matter Investigated by Neutron Scattering and Synchrotron Radiation Techniques and end 24 November with the Workshop on Physics of Mesosphere-Strato...