TUM Emeritus of Excellence receives award for statistical physics

Boltzmann Medal for Herbert Spohn

Yesterday, TUM Emeritus of Excellence Herbert Spohn became the first German to be honored with the Boltzmann Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). He received the medal in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Boltzmann Medal is awarded once every three years to outstanding scientists in the field of statistical physics who have not yet received the Nobel Prize.

From 1998 until his retirement in 2012 Spohn was Professor of Applied Probability Theory and Statistical Physics at the TUM Department of Mathematics. His work is motivated by issues from the field of physics, in particular electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and crystal growth. Above all, he dedicates himself to the study of many-particle systems and their thermodynamic limiting cases, asymptotic developments of these systems, and the influence of random interference. Herbert Spohn gained recognition due to his work on the microscopic derivation of the Boltzmann equation and the hydrodynamic limit of interacting stochastic particle systems. It was Spohn’s wide-ranging and highly influential work in non-equilibrium statistical physics which was now honored with the Boltzmann Medal.

In 1993, Spohn received the Max Planck Research Award, in 2011 the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, both the Leonard Eisenbud Prize of the American Mathematical Society and the George Cantor Medal in 2014, the Henri Poincaré Prize in 2015, and the German Physical Society's Max Planck Medal in 2017.