|
|
|
Copley Medal Awarded to Sir David Cox: Royal Society recognizes excellence in science
Royal Society (http://royalsociety.org), the UK’s independent academy for science, has announced the recipients of its 2010 Awards, Medals, Royal Medals and Lectures on June 9, 2010). The scientists receive the awards in recognition of their achievements in a wide variety of fields of research – the uniting factor is the excellence of their work and the profound implications their findings have had for others working in their relevant fields and wider society.
Two Copley medals, the world’s oldest prize for scientific achievement, have been awarded this year in celebration of the Royal Society’s 350th Anniversary. They are awarded to Sir David Cox FRS for his seminal contributions to the theory and applications of statistics and to Dr. Tomas Lindahl FRS for his seminal contributions to the understanding of the biochemistry of DNA repair.
Of his award, Dr Tomas Lindahl FRS said:
“I am deeply honoured to be awarded the Copley medal. I see this prestigious award as recognition of the important field of DNA repair, which was a small and often ignored area of research when I did my first experiments on instability and repair of DNA 40 years ago.”
Sir David Cox FRS added:
“I am deeply honored and indeed overwhelmed by the award of the Copley Medal with its illustrious history. Neither my theoretical nor my applied statistical research would have been possible without the collaboration of colleagues in many different fields.”
The Copley medal was first awarded by the Royal Society in 1731, 170 years before the first Nobel Prize. It is awarded for outstanding achievements in scientific research and has been awarded to such eminent scientists as Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
Dame Jean Thomas DBE FRS, Biological Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society, said:
“We are delighted to recognize not one, but two, remarkable scientists with the award of the Copley Medal in this our 350th anniversary year, something that has not often been done in the Society’s long history. Both are exemplary scientists who have made invaluable contributions to their fields.”
From Science News of the Royal Society, London
Editors’ note: A more detailed report on Sir David Cox’s achievements and the award of the Copley Medal is planned for the next issue.
The Committee for Conferences on Stochastic Processes is pleased to announce the approval by the Bernoulli Society Council of a new prize. The prize is to honour the scientific work of Wolfgang Doeblin and to recognize and promote outstanding work by researchers at the beginning of their mathematical careers in the field of probability.
Wolfgang Doeblin was born in Berlin in 1915. His family, of Jewish origin, were forced into exile and settled in Paris, where Doeblin attended the Sorbonne. From 1935, when he began work on Markov chains under Fréchet, until his death in 1940, he was occupied whenever he was able with research in probability. In this short time, he made many deep and original contributions.
From 1938, he served in the French Army and was stationed in defense of the German invasion, which came in May 1940. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for an action under enemy fire, to restore communications to his unit. Facing capture in June 1940, he took his own life.
Until the invasion, Doeblin had continued to work on mathematics. In February 1940, he sent to the Académie des Sciences de Paris a pli cacheté entitled “Sur l'équation de Kolmogoroff”. When finally in the year 2000 it was opened, it showed that he had understood many important ideas of modern probability, including the potential crucial role of martingales.
The Wolfgang Doeblin Prize will be awarded for the first time in 2012 at the World Congress of the Bernoulli Society in Istanbul, and afterward every two years.
It will be awarded to a single individual for work in the field of probability, and who is at the beginning of his or her mathematical career.
The Wolfgang Doeblin Prize is generously supported by Springer. The awardee will be invited to submit to the journal Probability Theory and Related Fields a paper for publication as the Wolfgang Doeblin Prize Article, and will also be invited to present a Doeblin Prize Lecture in a later conference on Stochastic Processes and their Applications or Bernoulli Society World Congress.
James Norris
Chair of the Committee for
Conferences on Stochastic Processes