IHES
Thibault Damour is awarded the 2021 Dirac Medal
Professor Thibault Damour is one of the four recipients of this year’s Dirac Medal, together with Alessandra Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), Frans Pretorius (Princeton University), and Saul Teukolsky (Caltech & Cornell University).
The prize acknowledges the four physicists’ theoretical contributions “establishing the predicted properties of gravitational waves in the curvature of spacetime produced when stars or black holes spiral together and merge”. Their work has been key to the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations since the gravitational signal produced by a collision of binary black holes was detected for the first time in 2015.
The Dirac Medal is awarded every year by ICTP, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, to scientists who have made significant contributions to theoretical physics.
Earlier this year Thibault Damour, Alessandra Buonanno and Frans Pretorius were awarded the 2021 Galileo Galilei Medal by the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare.
IHES warmly congratulates Prof. Damour and his colleagues on this prestigious award, which is yet another recognition of the importance of their theoretical work.
