The Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi joins the Clarivate Citation Laureates as one of the most cited scholars in the world in scientific publications, thus gaining a sort of ‘nomination’ for the Nobel Prize. President of the class of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences of the National Academy of Lincei and former president of the Academy, with this recognition Parisi enters the Clarivate Citation Laureates ex Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates, a list of candidates who are believed to win the Nobel Prize in the respective field. Candidates are named based on the citation impact of their published research. The list, published today, is the result of the analysis conducted by the Institute for Scientific Information which every year evaluates the impact of the researchers who have most influenced the international scientific community.
The Clarivate Citation Laureates 2021 this year welcomes 16 new researchers of different nationalities, including the Italian Giorgio Parisi, full professor of Theoretical Physics at Sapienza in Rome, former President of the Accademia dei Lincei. The scholar, first Italian to obtain such recognition, was awarded for “the revolutionary discoveries related to quantum chromodynamics and the study of complex disordered systems”. With Parisi, the Accademia dei Lincei once again expresses its many excellences because the Frenchman Jean-Pierre Changeux, neurobiologist and foreign partner of the Lincei, also appears on the list.
The analysis of the Institute for Scientific Information, conducted on the research areas Medicine or Physiology, Physics, Chemistry and Economics, finds in the impact of scientific publications the quantitative basis for drawing up the list of researchers who have most influenced the international scientific community. The list of Citation Laureates is made by turning attention to articles with more than 2000 citations: these are about 6,500 out of about 52 million of those indexed from 1970 to today and represent just over 0.01% of the total considered. This criterion greatly narrows the field of scholars considered for the Citation Laureates which currently number about 380, including 59 Nobel Laureates.
“I am extremely satisfied with the recognition of the Clarivate Citation Laureates, also because it is the first time that it has been given to an Italian “ commented Giorgio Parisi. “An acknowledgment of this nature – he underlined – is a collective award that is extended to a community. His credit also goes to the more than five hundred collaborators
that I had, with whom we had fun trying to unravel the mysteries of nature “.” I am very happy and honored to have received this prestigious award not only for having been included in a very prestigious company, but also for having taken it the same year as my friend Jean-Pierre Chaungeux, the famous neurologist, foreign partner of the Accademia dei Lincei “added the Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi who is a member of the Accademia dei Quaranta, the Académie des Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of the States United, the European Academy, the European Academy and the American Philosophical Society.
Giorgio Parisi is full professor of Theoretical Physics at Sapienza University of Rome, associate researcher at Infn National Institute of Nuclear Physics and was President of the Accademia dei Lincei (2018-2021). Born in Rome in 1948, Parisi completed his studies at Sapienza University of Rome where he graduated in physics in 1970 under the guidance of Nicola Cabibbo. Parisi began his scientific career at the Frascati National Laboratories of the Infn, first as a member of the CNR (1971-1973) and later as a researcher at the Infn (1973-1981). During this period he spent long stays abroad, first at Columbia University in New York (1973-1974), at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvettes (1976-1977), at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. (1977-1978).
In his scientific career, Parisi has made many decisive and widely recognized contributions in different areas of physics: in particle physics, statistical mechanics, fluid dynamics, condensed matter, supercomputer. He has also written articles on neural networks, the immune system and the movement of groups of animals. He was the winner of two ERC European Research Council advanced grants, in 2010 and 2016, and is the author of over six hundred articles and contributions to scientific conferences and four books. His works are well known.
The recognition of the Clarivate Citation Laureates is in addition to a long series of awards won by the Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi. In 1992 he was awarded the Boltzmann Medal – awarded every three years by the Iupap International Union of Pure and Applied Physics for new achievements in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics – for his contributions to the theory of disordered systems, and the Max Planck Medal in 2011, by the German physics company Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. He received the Feltrinelli awards for Physics in 1987, Italgas in 1993, the Dirac Medal for theoretical physics in 1999, the Italian Prime Minister’s award in 2002, Enrico Fermi in 2003, Dannie Heineman in 2005, Nonino in 2005, Galileo in 2006, Microsoft in 2007, Lagrange in 2009, Vittorio De Sica in 2011, Prix des Trois Physiciens in 2012, the Nature Award Mentoring in Science in 2013, High Energy and Particle Physics of the EPS European Physical Society in 2015, Lars Onsager of the APS American Physical Society in 2016. In 2021 he received the prestigious Wolf Prize for Physics.
(by Andreana d’Aquino)