To mark the occasion of P.A.M. Dirac’s birthday on 8 August, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, awards the Dirac Medal annually on that date to recognize contributions to theoretical physics and mathematics. This year, the ICTP honored Robert H. Kraichnan and Vladimir E. Zakharov. The pair share the prize for their “distinct contributions to the theory of turbulence, particularly the exact results and the prediction of inverse cascades, and for identifying classes of turbulence problems for which in-depth understanding has been achieved,” says the ICTP.
Kraichnan, who has been a research agency grantee and a consultant to a variety of organizations since 1962, has done “pioneering research on field-theoretic approaches to turbulence and other non-equilibrium systems,” according to the ICTP. In particular, he has predicted the inverse energy cascade and forward enstrophy cascade in two-dimensional turbulence. He developed soluble, self-consistent dynamical models that shared...
