People Briefs: Five Researchers Receive King Faisal Prizes In Science And Medicine

Five Researchers Receive King Faisal Prizes In Science And Medicine Two From France To Get Wolf Prize In Mathematics Herbert Walther, director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich, Germany, and a professor of physics at Munich University, and Steven Chu, chairman of the physics department at Stanford University, have been selected as recipients of the King Faisal International Prize for Science. Jean-Claude Chermann, director of the laboratory of retroviruses and associated diseases of the Institut Nationale de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) in Marseilles, France; Luc Montagnier, a professor at the viral oncology unit of the Pasteur Institute, Paris; and Francoise Barre-Sin-oussi, head of the retrovirus biology laboratory at INSERM, have been named as recipients of the King Faisal International Prize for Medicine. The foundation cited these researchers for being "the first to discover and characterize the virus that is responsible for AIDS." Montagnier, the leader of the lab in which both Chermann and Barre-Sinoussi work, has been embroiled in controversy since 1984 with National Cancer Institute researcher Robert Gallo over who was the first to discover the HIV virus. The topic of this year's International Prize in Science was quantum optics. According to the award citation, the prize was given to Walther for being "the first to investigate fundamental quantum phenomena involving single atoms and photons" and to Chu for "developing the technique of optical cooling and trapping of atoms." The 17-year-old King Faisal Foundation presents prizes in the fields of science, medicine, Arabic literature, Islamic studies, and service to Islam. This year, however, no prize in Arabic literature will be given. The foundation has been presenting the awards in science and medicine since 1982. The awards include a gold medallion and a cash prize of $93,333, an amount the co-winners share. Recent winners of the science prize include Caltech professor of chemical physics Ahmed Zewail (1989) and Texas A&M chemistry professor Frank Albert Cotton (1990). Two mathematics professors based in France, Mikhael Gromov of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IEHS) in Bures-sur- Yvette and Jacques Tits of the Collge de France in Paris, will share the 1993 Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Since 1978, the Israeli-based Wolf Foundation has been granting four $100,000 prizes annually for individual achievements among the five fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, physics, and the arts. No prize in medicine will be awarded this year. The prizes will be presented May 16 by Israeli President Chaim Herzog at the Knesset building in Jerusalem. Gromov, who spends one semester a year teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park, is being honored for his work in symplectic and Riemannian geometry and the geometry of groups. "The Wolf Prize is pleasant to have, but it's not the aim of my research," says Gromov, 49. "It's helpful to give us some publicity and focus public attention to not only geometry, but mathematics in general." Gromov, a native of Russia, received his Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Leningrad. He emigrated to the United States and worked as a professor of mathematics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, from 1974 to 1981. In 1982, he became a permanent fellow at IHES in France. He began his appointment at Maryland in 1991. Tits, a native of Belgium, is receiving the prize for his "contributions to the theory of the structure of algebraic and other classes of groups and in particular for the theory of buildings," according to the award citation. Tits, 62, received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Brussels in 1950. From 1957 to 1963 he was a professor at Brussels, and from 1964 to 1973 he taught at the University of Bonn. He came to the Collge de France in 1973. --Ron Kaufman

People Briefs: Five Researchers Receive King Faisal Prizes In Science And Medicine

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