8 | IHES Annual Report 2021 IHES Annual Report 2021 | 9

SCIENTIFIC AWARDS

Galileo Galilei Medal - Galileo Galilei Institute On February 15, the date of birth of the scientist, Galileo Galilei, they received the Galileo Galilei Medal awarded by Istituto nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy) and Galileo Galilei Institute (Istituto nazionale di Fisica Nucleare's National Center for Advanced Studies), in partnership with the University of Florence. This medal, also awarded to Frans Pretorius, professor of physics at Princeton University and Director of the Princeton Gravity Initiative, recognizes their outstanding and fundamental contribution to the advancement of research in theoretical physics.

Balzan Prize - International Balzan Prize Foundation

In September, T. Damour and A. Buonanno received the Balzan Prize in the field of Gravity: Physical and Astrophysical Aspects . It is awarded by the International Balzan Prize Foundation (Italy) for their leadership in the prediction of the gravitational wave signals produced when compact objects like neutron stars and black holes spiral together and eventually merge.

Dirac Medal - ICTP

On August 8, the date of birth of Paul Dirac (20th century mathematician and physicist), they were awarded the Dirac Medal by ICTP (the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics - Italy). This medal, jointly received by Frans Pretorius and Saul Teulosky, Robinson Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech (USA) and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Cornell University (USA), was awarded for having established the predicted properties of gravitational waves in the curvature of space-time, produced when stars or black holes come close together and merge.

► Thibault Damour, permanent professor in theoretical physics at IHES since 1989, has been recognized with three international distinctions in 2021.

He has received those awards together with Alessandra Buonanno, current Director of the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam (Germany).

Indeed, the three distinctions reward researches made in collaboration with A. Buonanno when she had a postdoc position at IHES (1997-1999). Their researches were on the prediction of the gravitational wave signals produced when compact objects merge.

T. Damour has been elected socio straniero (foreign member) of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, the Italian Academy of sciences and member of the Scientific Council of the Galileo Galilei Institute.

T. Damour is among the authors of the article published in Physical review X, considered as the first journal in physics in the word, presenting results of a 16-year long experiment which proves the relevance of the general relativity with an unprecedented precision. T. Damour contributed the theoretical framework underlying many of the results presented in the paper.

► For the second year in a row, Université Paris-Saclay, of which IHES is a founding member, was ranked 1st in the world in mathematics and 9th in physics in the ranking by discipline delivered by the Shanghai Jiao-Tong University.

In the overall ranking, Université Paris-Saclay gained one point compared to last year, placing it in 13th place.

IHES, founding member of the Université Paris-Saclay