The first Kavli prizes were announced today in Oslo, Norway. Fred Kavli, a science philanthropist who has been establishing research centers around the world in his main areas of interest, established the prizes as a rival to the Nobel prizes but in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience. Each prize is US$1 million shared between the winners.
Symmetry readers are probably most interested in the astrophysics prize: It will be shared by Maarten Schmidt, of the California Institute of Technology, United States, and Donald Lynden-Bell, of Cambridge University, United Kingdom, "for their seminal contributions to understanding the nature of quasars."
You can read more about the prizes in Dennis Overbye's piece in the New York Times and more at the Kavli Foundation's Web site.
