ICTP has awarded its 2025 Dirac Medal to four distinguished physicists "for their landmark contributions which have significantly shaped the study of general relativity across many generations. Their work collectively has laid the conceptual and technical foundations of our understanding of gravity, at both the classical and quantum levels".

The 2025 Dirac Medallists are:
 

Gary Horowitz (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

"Gravitational aspects of string theory"
Abstract: I will briefly discuss Calibi-Yau spaces, black p-branes, and holographic superconductors, reviewing what they are and how they were discovered. I will also comment on their impact on later developments.


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Roy Kerr (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)

"It’s Spinning"
Abstract: A brief description of the construction of the Kerr Metric.


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Robert Wald (University of Chicago, USA)

"Black Holes and Thermodynamics"
Abstract: In the 1970s, a remarkable connection between black holes and thermodynamics was discovered: Bardeen, Carter, and Hawking showed that black holes in general relativity satisfy close analogs of the laws of thermodynamics, and Hawking showed that particle creation effects result in thermal radiation from black holes. These results leave no doubt that black holes in general relativity should be assigned an entropy equal to 1/4 of their horizon area, as originally suggested by Bekenstein. However, many issues concerning the meaning of black hole entropy remain. In this talk, I will briefly review my work---particularly, work done in collaboration with my student, Vivek Iyer---deriving the first law of black hole mechanics directly from Lagragian structure, thereby yielding a formula for the entropy of a black hole in an arbitrary diffeomorphism covariant theory of gravity.




The event will be livestreamed from the ICTP website: www.ictp.it/livestream

Light refreshments will be served after the event.