The Weyl-Wigner Award

The Weyl-Wigner Award

The Weyl-Wigner Award, which replaced previous Wigner Medal, is an award designed “to recognize outstanding contributions to the understanding of physics through Group Theory”. It is administered by the Group Theory and Fundamental Physics Foundation, a publicly supported organization.

This Award is unique because it is a truly international award. It is not affiliated with any state or national society. The awarded is chosen by an international selection committee whose members are elected by the Board of Trustees of the Foundation and by the Standing Committee of the International Group Theory Colloquium.

The old Wigner Medal was established in 1977/78 and was awarded for the first time at the Integrative Conference on Group Theory and Mathematical Physics (Group7, 1978) to E. P. Wigner and V. Bargmann.

Wigner medalists:

• 1978 Eugene P. Wigner
• 1978 Valentin Bargmann
• 1980 Israel M. Gel’fand
• 1982 Louis Michel
• 1984 Yuval Ne’eman
• 1986 Feza Gürsey
• 1988 Isadore M. Singer
• 1990 Franchesco Iachello
• 1992 Julius Wess and Bruno Zumino
• 1996 Victor Kac and Robert V. Moody
• 1998 Marcos Moshinsky
• 2000 Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh
• 2002 Harry J. Lipkin
• 2004 Erdal İnönü
• 2006 Susumo Okubo
• 2010 Michio Jimbo
• 2012 Chester A. Mead
• 2014 Joshua Zak
• 2016 Bertram Kostant
• 2018 Pavel Winternitz

It is the aim of the Standing Committee that the new Weyl-Wigner Award keeps the high standards of quality and excellence of the Wigner Medal.

The purpose of the Weyl-Wigner Award is to recognize outstanding contributions to the understanding of physics through group theory, continuing the tradition of the Wigner Medal.

Contributions recognized by the Award may include the development and application of mathematical methods, applications of group theoretical methods in chemistry and other sciences, experimental predictions or formulations of general laws of nature using methods of group theory or representation theory, and other related developments. Group theory shall be construed in its widest sense, to include related mathematical structures.

First Weyl-Wigner Award Selection Committee: E. Zelmanov (Chair, U. California – San Diego), M. Cheng (U. Amsterdam), A. Klimov (U. Guadalajara), S. Serfaty (New York U.), R. Werner (Leibniz U. Hannover).

The first Weyl-Wigner Award was awarded, in Strasbourg in July 2022 coinciding with Group34, to Nikolai Reshetikhin of  the University of California at Berkeley (USA), for his seminal contributions to representation theory of quantum groups, integrable systems and their applications in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.

The 2024 Weyl-Wigner Award Selection Committee was composed by: N. Reshetikhin (Chair, Tsinghua U.– Beijing, China), P. Etingof (MIT, Cambridge, USA), R. Kerner (Sorbonne U., Paris, France), S. Serfaty (New York U., USA) and E. Zelmanov (U. California – San Diego, USA).

The 2024 Weyl-Wigner Award is given, in Cotonou, Benin, to Prof. Igor Frenkel for his fundamental contributions to representation theory of infinite dimensional Lie algebras, their applications in theoretical physics and for seminal contributions to vertex operator algebras and the categorification program.

The 2024 Weyl-Wigner Award is given, in Cotonou, Benin, to Prof. Michele Vergne for her fundamental contributions to algebra, representation theory and geometry. Her contributions were instrumental in developing modern tools in mathematical physics.