At its annual meeting last March in Leipzig, the German Physical Society (DPG) presented its medals and prizes for 2002, including the new Hertha Sponer Prize, which recognizes young women’s outstanding work in physics. Karina Morgenstern, who is doing her habilitation at the Free University of Berlin, is the first recipient of this prize. The society honored her work on the dynamics of surface phenomena. Her research focuses on nanostructures and the behavior of molecules on metallic surfaces.
The Max Planck Medal, the society’s most important award for theoretical physics, went to Jürgen Ehlers for his contributions to the general theory of relativity, to cosmology, and to general-relativistic kinetic theory and hydrodynamics. Ehlers is an emeritus professor of physics at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) near Potsdam.
J. Peter Toennies received the society’s most important award for experimental physics, the Stern–Gerlach Medal, for his...