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IMAGE: Gerald Holton, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Humanities. view more
Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Humanities category has gone in this thirteenth edition to Gerald Holton for his numerous seminal contributions to the history of 19th and 20th century science, in which he has shown a special sensitivity to cultural, philosophical, and sociological and gender contexts, says the committee in its citation.
Holton, it continues, has developed a reasoned analysis of the complex phenomenon of anti-science, and its role in totalitarianism.
The citation refers also to his innovative contributions to science education, his decisive role in the preservation of Albert Einstein s documentary legacy, and his studies into the fate of children forced to flee Nazi Germany.
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IMAGE: Ben Bernanke, Mark Gertler, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, and John Moore, winners of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics. view more
Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management category has gone in this thirteenth edition to Ben Bernanke (The Brookings Institution, Washington DC), Mark Gertler (University of New York), Nobuhiro Kiyotaki (Princeton University) and John Moore (University of Edinburgh) for fundamental contributions to our understanding of how financial market imperfections can amplify macroeconomic fluctuations and generate deep macroeconomic recessions, in the words of the award citation. In the last 15 years, says the committee, advanced economies have been hit by large macroeconomic shocks arising from the financial side. By 2008, fuelled by the liquidity glut stemming from emerging countries and by lax prudential supervision, many financial instit
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IMAGE: Michael Grätzel, winner of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences. view more
Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category has gone in this thirteenth edition to Paul Alivisatos (University of California, Berkeley, United States) and Michael Grätzel (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) for their fundamental contributions to the development of new nanomaterials already in use for the production of renewable energies and in latest-generation electronics. Grätzel s groundbreaking work includes the invention of a dye-sensitized solar cell named after him, reads the committee s citation, while Alivisatos has made pioneering contributions in using semiconductor nanocrystals for energy and display applications.
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Credit: BBVA FOUNDATION
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category has gone in this thirteenth edition to ecologists Sandra Díaz (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, and Argentine National Research Council, CONICET), Sandra Lavorel (Laboratoire d Ecologie Alpine [LECA], Grenoble, France, and Landcare Research, Lincoln, New Zealand) and Mark Westoby (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia), for expanding the concept of biodiversity, through their pioneering work to discover, describe and coordinate the measurement of plant functional traits.
Independently and collaboratively, the awardees focused their research on arranging each plant s ecosystem function along dimensions of measurable physical traits, such as height, leaf type or seed size, enabling them to locate patterns in the functional diversity of species at a global level. The catalogue of these functional traits has now become a vast database,
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Jan. 31, 2021
The personal story of Jacob Ziv, 89, is woven into the fabric of Israeli high-tech’s history. You’ve probably never heard of him, but you have certainly used technology based on his mathematical inventions - most famously lossless compression of data which enables us to use files like PDF, GIF, MP3 and countless others.
Ziv was one of the first Israeli scientists who completed their doctoral studies abroad and returned to teach at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. He introduced the use of transistors at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, headed the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education and served as president of the National Academy of Sciences. He did his military reserve service in the special operations department of Military Intelligence (today s Unit 81) and he even managed to found a startup together with the veteran tech entrepreneur and investor Joseph Yossi Vardi.