Center for Polymer Studies Director H. Eugene Stanley will be honored with the 2004 Boltzmann Award, an award given out only every three years, in recognition of his groundbreaking research that led to a brand new sub-field of science.
A group of signatories that included five Nobel laureates nominated the College of Arts and Sciences professor because of his 37 years of innovative and original research into physical phenomena and his creation of econophysics, a field that combines the study of statistical mechanics and economics.
The award, which is presented every three years by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Commission on Statistical Physics, honors excellence in statistical physics. Stanley, who has received numerous awards throughout his career, said it was the greatest recognition.
“It is about 10 times higher than any other award,” he said. “It is the highest award given in my part of physics.”
Econophysics is one of Stanley’s biggest contributions to science, according to Center for Polymer Studies Research Associate Sergey Buldyrev. It has “created many, many new scientists and will help him and his work be remembered forever,” Buldyrev said.
Stanley said he was not aware that he had even been nominated before the award winner was announced.
“I got a phone call at 5 a.m. from Bangalore, India saying that I had won,” he said. “It came as a shock and a surprise.”
Stanley said that the award, which he will receive in July, will have a large impact on the scientific community at BU.
“My students are very excited because all of my research is done with students,” he said. “They can tell their mothers they did something important at BU.”
Buldyrev said the students were overjoyed with Stanley’s accomplishment.
“He is like a father to his students because he takes responsibility for them,” Buldyrev said. “He is an extremely good teacher and has a wonderful talent to make a complex problem seem really simple.”
The Boltzmann Award will bring grants to BU and attract higher-grade students, Buldyrev said.
“This is a very prestigious award and it will be really good for BU because it means this is a first-class university which has really first-class scientists,” he said.
Stanley said his other research has contributed to the understanding of disordered systems and the structure of liquid water and produced new theories.
“My field is fantastic,” Stanley said. “I study the field of pattern formations, like why snowflakes look the way they do and trees look the way they do and even how the economy works.”
Buldyrev added that one of Stanley’s greatest scientific accomplishments is his percolation model for water, which links the degree to which changes in the physical characteristics of liquid water result from local changes in its physical structure.
In recent years, Stanley has received the 2001 National Science Foundation Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholar and the 2002 Memory Ride Prize for research on Alzheimer’s disease, but he said neither of those compare to the Boltzmann award.
The Boltzmann Award is named after Ludwig Boltzmann, the 19th century Austrian physicist who invented statistical mechanics. The award is “the same as the Nobel Prize, but in a specialized field,” Buldyrev said.
The award will be presented to Stanley in July during the Commission’s six-day International Olympics, which will be held in India.
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