Alexander Polyakov Awarded 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize

The 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize has been awarded to Alexander Polyakov, a theoretical physicist from Princeton University and a recipient of ICTP's 1986 Dirac Medal. The announcement was made in a ceremony held at the Geneva International Conference Centre on 20 March 2013.

The Prize, which is given by the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation, carries a cash award of US $3 million. It recognizes Polyakov's many discoveries in field theory and string theory, including the conformal bootstrap, magnetic monopoles, instantons, confinement/de-confinement, the quantization of strings in non-critical dimensions, gauge/string duality and many others.

Polyakov was awarded the Dirac Medal in 1986 for being among the first to emphasize the importance of scale invariance in quantum field theory, particularly in connection with the theory of critical phenomena. He was also one of the first to recognize the relevance of the topological ideas in field theory, through the discovery of the monopole and instanton solutions in non-Abelian Yang-Mills theories.

The complete citation of Polyakov's Dirac Medal can be found on the Dirac Medal webpage. Polyakov was also a participant at the 15th Anniversary Meeting of the Dirac Medallists held at ICTP in 2000, where he delivered a lecture on String Theory and Quark Confinement (link to audio recording of the lecture).