At the Special Libraries Association’s annual conference in San Antonio, Texas, in June, Günther Eichhorn received the PAM Award for 2001 from the Washington, DC-based Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division of the SLA. A project scientist with the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Eichhorn was recognized, in part, for his role “in the genesis and growth of the Astrophysics Data System, the development of which represents an unparalleled shift in the propagation of the literature of astronomy.”
The Canadian Astronomical Society recently handed out three awards. Peter G. Brown, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, received the J. S. Plaskett Medal, awarded jointly with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, for the most outstanding thesis in astronomy or astrophysics in Canada. His thesis was entitled “Evolution of Two Periodic Meteoroid Streams: The Perseids and the Leonids.” James E. Gunn, a professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University, was awarded the R. M. Petrie Prize Lecture by CASCA. He gave a lecture entitled “The SLOAN Digital Sky Survey: A Year In” at CASCA’s annual meeting in May. CASCA and the RASC jointly awarded the Helen Sawyer Hogg Public Lecture to Jill Tarter, director for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) research and Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Her talk was entitled “SETI: Pulling Signals Out of Noise” at the May meeting.
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) earlier this year awarded Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence G. Roberts the Charles Stark Draper Prize for “principal contributions to the development of technologies that are the foundation of the Internet, a stunning engineering achievement that profoundly influences people, commerce, communications, productivity, and interpersonal relationships throughout the world,” according to the citation. Cerf is senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology with World-Com in Ashburn, Virginia. Kahn is chairman, CEO, and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Virginia. Kleinrock is a computer sciences professor at UCLA, and founder and chair of Nomadix in Los Angeles. Roberts is the founder, chair, and chief technology officer of Caspian Networks in San Jose, California.
NAE’s Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize went to Earl Bakken and Wilson Greatbatch for “saving, extending, and improving the quality of human lives through the engineering development and commercialization of implantable heart pacemakers.” Bakken was senior chairman of the board of Medtronic Inc in Minneapolis, Minnesota, until his retirement in 1989; he remains active in the company as founder and director emeritus. Greatbatch is president of Greatbatch Gen-Aid Ltd in Akron, New York.
During a June ceremony in Washington, DC, the Boston-based Computerworld Honors Program handed out its annual awards to organizations in 10 categories. The awards acknowledged the organizations’ most innovative applications of technology that benefit society. The program also honored three individuals with leadership awards. Of the awards given, one was related to work in physics. The 21st-Century Achievement Award in the science category went to CERN for its Datawarehouse, “a dynamically reconfigurable computing system architecture [that] allows a world-renowned physics center to simultaneously upgrade and match its resources to the constantly changing needs of its experimenters.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm has selected Elliott H. Lieb, Higgins Professor of Physics and a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, as the winner of the Rolf Schock Prize for 2001 in the mathematics category. Lieb is being honored for “his outstanding work in mathematical physics, particularly for his contribution to the mathematical understanding of the quantum-mechanical many-body theory and for his work on exact solutions of models in statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.” He will receive the award and a cash prize of 500 000 krona (about $47 000) in October at a ceremony in Stockholm. The award will also be given in the categories of logic and philosophy, the visual arts, and the musical arts.
