Prize Recipient

Shlomo Havlin
Bar-Ilan University

Citation:

"For pioneering new approaches to the study of complex systems, using the complementary approaches of nonlinear dynamics and statisical physics, and for communicating the excitement of this new field to diverse audiences"

Background:

Havlin, born in 1942 in Jerusalem, obtained his M.Sc.  at Tel-Aviv University and his PhD at Bar-Ilan University in 1972. Havlin became Professor of Physics at Bar-IIan in 1984 and served as Chair from 1984 - 1988, and as Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences from 1999 - 2001.  He was elected to President of the Israel Physical Society and served from 1996-1999.

Havlin and his collaborators made fundamental contributions in statistical physics that opened new avenues of active research in several areas, among which are the following:

(i) Understanding anomalous transport in disordered media.

ii) Discovery of long range correlations in DNA sequences and in) physiological data; the related development of the DFA method for analyzing non-stationary records.

 (iii) Demonstration that many networks belong to a new universality class due to their heterogeneous topology, represented e.g., by the absence of a percolation threshold and novel critical exponents.

Havlin has been honored by the Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences (2009) the APS Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach (2006), the Excellence National Center Award, Israel (2004), the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (Germany, 1992), and the Landau Prize (Israel,1988).

Selection Committee:

Richart Slusher, Chair, C.G. Callan, Jr, H.E. Stanley, E. Beise, A. Epstein