Author | Xu Keying
On February 8, local time in Israel, the 2022 Wolf Prize was officially announced. Seven scientists from the United States, Sweden, Canada and other countries have won three awards in the fields of mathematics, physics and chemistry.
The Wolf Prize, founded in 1976, is one of the highest academic awards in the world, with a prize fund of $100,000 each. According to statistics, about 1/3 of the Wolf Prize winners have finally won the Nobel Prize, so the Wolf Prize is also known as the "Nobel Prize weather vane".
Winners of the 2022 Wolf Prize in Mathematics and reasons for their award
The Wolf Prize in Mathematics is regarded as one of the three most important awards in mathematics. The 2021 Wolf Prize in Mathematics is vacant and not awarded. Previously, the famous Chinese mathematicians Chen Shengshen and Yau Chengtong won the award in 1983 and 2010 respectively.
George Lusztig
George Lusztig, a Romanian-American mathematician and MIT professor, received the 2022 Wolf Prize in Mathematics for his "pioneering contributions to expression theory and its related fields" and to rate him as "one of the greatest mathematicians of our time."
George Lusztig studies the theory of proportional representations of geometric finite reduction groups and algebraic groups. His work is highly original, broad-based, exceptionally skilled and deeply understood at the heart of the issues involved.
Lusztig graduated from the University of Bucharest with a bachelor's degree and graduated from Princeton University in 1971 with a master's and doctorate. After being a professor at the University of Warwick from 1974 to 1977, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978.
Lusztig is known for his work on representation theory, especially for objects closely related to algebraic groups, such as finite reduction groups, Hecke algebras, P-adic groups, quantum groups, and Weyl groups. He basically paved the way for modern representation theory. This includes some basic new concepts, including character sheaves, "Deligne-Lusztig" clusters, and "Kazhdan-Lusztig" polynomials.
Winners of the 2022 Wolf Prize in Physics and reasons for their award
Professor Anne L'Huillier at Lund University in Sweden, Paul Corkum professor at the University of Ottawa, and Professor Felenc Krausz at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics received the 2022 Wolf Prize in Physics for their "pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and atassecond physics."
Anne L'Huillier
Anne L'Huillier is a French/Swedish physicist and professor of atomic physics at Lund University, where he studies the interaction between short, strong laser pulses and atoms.
L'Huillier, who had a double master's degree in theoretical physics and mathematics, switched to experimental physics and received his PhD from the University of Paris VI in 1986. Subsequently, she was permanently employed as a researcher at the French Atomic and Alternative Energy Commission (CEA). He became a full professor at Lund University in 1997 and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2004.
Anne L'Huillier was one of the first to experimentally demonstrate the production of higher harmonics, a process of attosecond pulse formation and contributed significantly to the development of an appropriate theoretical description of this process. She has also conducted many groundbreaking experiments to improve understanding of fundamental processes and is a key player in the formation of new attosecond scientific research fields.
Paul Corkum
Paul Corkum, Canadian physicist, leader and pioneer in the field of ultrafast laser spectroscopy. For three decades, he has been a leading discoverer of the enormous potential of this field, known for his outstanding contributions to the field of higher harmonic generation and for proposing intuitive models that help explain the complex phenomena associated with the atsecond spectrum.
Corkum graduated from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in 1973 with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and posted his Ph.D. at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). Today, Corkum leads the NRC/University of Ottawa Athosecond Joint Laboratory for Science and chairs Canadian Research at the University of Ottawa.
Francis Krausz
Ferenc Krausz, a Hungarian-Austrian physicist, was the first in the world to generate and measure attosecond pulses of light and use them to capture the movement of electrons inside atoms.
Krausz received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Budapest University of Science and Technology in 1985, his Ph.D. in Quantum Electronics from the Vienna University of Technology in 1991, his Habilitation from the Vienna University of Technology in 1993, and he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering as Associate Professor in 1998 and became a full professor in 1999. In 2003, he was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany. Since 2004 he has been Professor of Physics and Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Munich.
Winners of the 2022 Wolf Prize in Chemistry and reasons for their award
Princeton University Professor Bonnie L. Bassler, Stanford University Professor Carolyn R. Bertozzi, and Scripps Institute Benjamin F. Cravatt III were awarded the 2022 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. In recognition of their "pioneering contributions to understanding cellular communication chemistry and inventing chemical methods to study the role of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins in such biological processes."
Bonnie Bassler
Bonnie Bassler received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for her role in elucidating chemical communication between bacteria. She made important discoveries that revealed how quorum sensing can be used by bacteria for their toxicity, as well as for communication across species.
Bassler is Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She focuses on how bacteria communicate with each other chemically. Specifically, Bassler studies a phenomenon called quadrangle sensing, which involves the production, release, and detection of a series of chemical signals. These signals allow bacterial communities to regulate gene expression, thereby regulating their behavior at the population level. Understanding group sensing is not only of great application value in microbiology, but also helps to understand the development of higher organisms. Therapies that interfere with quorum induction are expected to fight infections with drug-resistant bacteria. The Wolf Prize concluded that "her work has a wide range of applications for the development of novel antimicrobial therapies, or the next generation of antibiotics." ”
Carolyn R. Bertozzi
Carolyn Bertozzi won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for his exploration of bioorthogonal chemistry, understanding glycocalyx (glycoproteins and glycolipids on the cell surface) and their role in health and disease. This can be used for biological imaging, chemical proteomics, and in vivo drug delivery.
Bertozzi received his B.A. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1988. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. After completing postdoctoral work in cytoimmunology at the University of California, San Francisco, she joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. In June 2015, he joined Stanford University.
Bertozzi's research focuses on analyzing changes in glycosylation on the cell surface. She invented the field of biorthogonal chemistry, which allows researchers to chemically modify molecules in living systems without interfering with protological chemical processes.
Benjamin F. Cravatt III
Benjamin Cravatt received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for developing activity-based protein analysis techniques. This powerful tool has been widely used in the study of chemical proteomics for the analysis of enzyme function in biological systems. Using this method, he analyzed a large number of enzymes that play a key role in human biology and disease, including endogenous cannabinoid hydrolases, whose lipid products regulate cell-to-cell communication.
Cravatt received his bachelor's degree in biology and his bachelor's degree in history from Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from the Scripps Institute (TSRI) in 1996 and joined TSRI in 1997. His research interests focus on understanding the function of proteins in human physiological and pathological processes and using the knowledge gained to discover innovative therapeutic targets, as well as new drugs to treat disease.
Cravatt's work on endocannabinoid systems has dramatically changed the landscape of proteome analysis. He also pioneered a technique known as "activity-based protein analysis" (ABPP), which uses chemical probes to directly analyze the function of enzymes. For example, fluorescently labeling enzymes with certain chemical properties allows scientists to see the location of all active enzymes in a cell at once and determine drug targets directly in living systems.
Source:
https://wolffund.org.il/the-wolf-prize/