Nine senior scientists will be inducted into the Israel Academy of the Sciences
and Humanities in Jerusalem on Tuesday. They were voted in by the general
assembly of the academy following recommendations of members of the academy from
its two branches – natural sciences and the humanities and social
sciences.
There will thus be 105 life members in the
academy.
Although the president of the academy, Prof. Ruth Arnon, is a
woman, none of the nine is female. The academy, the supreme body of Israeli
science, brings together the best in the various fields and is aimed at
promoting and advancing scientific activity in the country. It also advises the
government on research and other relevant issues..
The new members are
Prof. Shlomo Avineri, Prof. Amnon Aharony, Prof. Emanuel Tov, Prof. Elon
Lindenstrauss, Prof. Amihai Mazar, Prof. David Milstein, Prof. Nadav
Na’aman, Prof. Ben-Ami Shillony and Prof. Shlomo Shamai.
The Polish-born
Avineri is an emeritus professor of political science at the Hebrew University
and conducted much research on the political thought and philosophy of Marx and
Hegel.
Rather than remaining in an ivory tower, he served as
director-general of the Foreign Ministry during the first Rabin
government.
Aharony, who was born in Israel, is an emeritus physics
professor at Tel Aviv University and still teaches at Ben-Gurion University of
the Negev. He is one of the world’s leaders in statistical physics and received
numerous prizes, including the Rothschild and Landau prizes in Israel and others
in Germany and Norway.
Tov, born in Amsterdam, is an emeritus professor
of Bible Studies at the Hebrew University who contributed much to the research
on the Greek Septuagint. He was also one of the editors of the Hebrew University
Bible Project and editor-in-chief of the international Dead Sea Scrolls
Publication Project.
Lindenstrauss, a native of Jerusalem, is a
mathematics professor at the Hebrew University and a winner of the 2010 Fields
Medal. Since 2004, he has also been a professor at Princeton University.
Lindenstrauss works in the area of dynamics, particularly in the area of ergodic
theory and its applications in number theory.
Mazar, he has been
professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University since 1994.
He has directed archeological excavations at a number of sites in Israel
including Timna, Beit She’an and Tel Rehov.
Milstein is an chemist best
known for his research on metal-mediated activation and functionalization of
very strong chemical bonds. He was brought by his parents to Israel in 1949 from
Germany and, as a professor of organic chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of
Science, authored over 220 publications in peer-reviewed journals. He has won
the Israel Prize, among many other awards.
Na’aman, who was born in
Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim in 1939, is a professor emeritus of Jewish history at Tel
Aviv University whose special interests include the ancient Near East, the Bible
and archeology. He wrote six books and edited seven more and has published more
than 280 articles in journals.
Shillony was born in Poland in 1937 and
spent the war years as a child in the then-Soviet Union. He moved to Israel in
1948 and settled with his parents on Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak. A graduate of the
Hebrew University, he is an expert in Japanese history and culture at the Hebrew
University. Shillony won the Japan Foundation Award, among other prizes, and has
even been granted an audience with the emperor and empress.
Shamai is a
professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion- Israel
Institute of Technology, and his research areas cover a wide spectrum of topics
in information theory and statistical communications.