The 2018 Marcel Grossmann Award for Rashid Sunyaev

Professor Rashid Sunyaev, Director-emeritus of the Max-Planck-Institute for astrophysics has been awarded the 2018 Marcel Grossmann Award.

July 19, 2018

The award ceremony took place during the 15th Marcel Grossmann Meeting in Rome earlier this month. The citation for Rashid Sunyaev reads: “for the development of theoretical tools in the scrutinising, through the CMB, of the first observable electromagnetic appearance of our Universe".


The Award is named after a mathematician Marcel Grossmann, a close collaborator of Albert Einstein, who developed mathematical foundations of the Theory of General Relativity. It is presented by the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Network (ICRANet) every three years in two nominations - individual and institutional.


Other recipients of the 2018 Marcel Grossmann Award in the category individual nomination are Prof. Lyman Page (Princeton University) and mathematician Prof. Shing-Tung Yau (Harvard University). In the institutional nomination, the Award was given to the Planck collaboration (ESA) and to Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory at Stanford University. Each recipient received a silver casting of the TEST (Traction of Events in Space-Time) sculpture by Attilio Pierelli. The original casting was presented to Pope John Paul II on the first occasion of the Marcel Grossmann Awards in 1985.


Among previous recipients of this award were: Stephen Hawking, Roy Kerr, Roger Penrose, Lord Martin Rees, Max-Planck scientists Michael Kramer and Joachim Truemper and Nobelists Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, Riccardo Giacconi, Tsung-Dao Lee, Abdus Salam and Chen Ning Yang.

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