Saul Perlmutter, whose research on the nature of dark energy has brought him great renown, is the winner of the 2006 International Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in the Physical and Mathematical Sciences. The honor is awarded every five years by Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, one of whose earliest members was Galileo Galilei.
Perlmutter is a senior scientist and astrophysicist in the physics division of the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the cofounder and leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, principal investigator of the proposed SuperNova/Acceleration Probe (SNAP) satellite, and leader of other efforts to discover more about the nature of dark energy.
The Lincei Academy—literally “Academy of Lynxes,” named for the animal’s supposed powers of observation—was founded in 1603, at the dawn of the scientific revolution. Today it is regarded as Italy’s...
