The Max Planck medal is the highest award of the

German Physical Society The German Physical Society (German: , DPG) is the oldest organisation of physicists. The DPG's worldwide membership is cited as 60,547, as of 2019, making it the largest physics society in the world. It holds an annual conference () and multiple ...

, the world's largest organization of physicists, for extraordinary achievements in

theoretical physics Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experi ...

. The prize has been awarded annually since 1929, with few exceptions, and usually to a single person. The winner is awarded with a gold medal and hand-written parchment. In 1943 it was not possible to manufacture the gold medal because the

Berlin Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...

foundry was hit by a bomb. The board of directors of the German Physical Society decided to manufacture the medals in a substitute metal and to deliver the gold medals later. The highest award of the German Physical Society for outstanding results in experimental physics is the

Stern–Gerlach Medal The Stern–Gerlach Medal is the most prestigious German Award for experimental physicists, named after the scientists of the Stern–Gerlach experiment, Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach. The prize, awarded annually since 1993, is awarded by the Deu ...

List of recipients

*2023

Rashid A. Sunyaev Rashid Alievich Sunyaev ( tt-Cyrl, Рәшит Гали улы Сөнәев, russian: Раши́д Али́евич Сюня́ев; born 1 March 1943 in Tashkent, USSR) is a German, Soviet, and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He got his ...

*2022 Annette Zippelius *2021 Alexander Markovich Polyakov *2020

Andrzej Buras Andrzej Jerzy Buras (Polish pronunciation: ; born 26 October 1946 in Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish-born Danish theoretical physicist, professor emeritus at the Technical University Munich (TUM). Scientific career He received his master's degree ...

*2019 Detlef Lohse *2018

Juan Ignacio Cirac Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain (born 11 October 1965), known professionally as Ignacio Cirac, is a Spanish physicist. He is one of the pioneers of the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Pr ...

*2017 Herbert Spohn *2016 Herbert Wagner *2015

Viatcheslav Mukhanov Viatcheslav Fyodorovich Mukhanov (russian: Вячесла́в Фёдорович Муха́нов; born October 2, 1956) is a Soviet/ Russian born German theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is best known for the theory of Quantum Origin ...

*2014 David Ruelle *2013 Werner Nahm *2012 Martin Zirnbauer *2011 Giorgio Parisi *2010

Dieter Vollhardt Dieter Vollhardt (born September 8, 1951) is a German physicist and Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Augsburg. Scientific work Vollhardt is one of the founders of the Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) for strongly correlated m ...

*2009 Robert Graham *2008 Detlev Buchholz *2007 Joel Lebowitz *2006 Wolfgang Götze *2005

Peter Zoller Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a ...

*2004 Klaus Hepp *2003 Martin Gutzwiller *2002

Jürgen Ehlers Jürgen Ehlers (; 29 December 1929 – 20 May 2008) was a German physicist who contributed to the understanding of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. From graduate and postgraduate work in Pascual Jordan's relativity research group ...

*2001

Jürg Fröhlich Jürg Martin Fröhlich (born 4 July 1946 in Schaffhausen) is a Swiss mathematician and theoretical physicist. He is best known for introducing rigorous techniques for the analysis of statistical mechanics models, in particular continuous symmet ...

*2000 Martin Lüscher *1999 Pierre Hohenberg *1998 Raymond Stora *1997 Gerald E. Brown *1996 Ludvig Faddeev *1995 Siegfried Grossmann *1994

Hans-Jürgen Borchers Hans-Jürgen Borchers (24 January 1926, Hamburg – 10 September 2011, Göttingen) was a mathematical physicist at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen who worked on operator algebras and quantum field theory. He introduced Borchers algebras a ...

*1993 Kurt Binder *1992 Elliott H. Lieb *1991 Wolfhart Zimmermann *1990 Hermann Haken *1989

Bruno Zumino Bruno Zumino (28 April 1923 − 21 June 2014) was an Italian theoretical physicist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his DSc degree from the University of Rome in 1945. He was renowned for his rigorous pro ...

*1988 Valentine Bargmann *1987

Julius Wess Julius Erich Wess (5 December 19348 August 2007) was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted as the co-inventor of the Wess–Zumino model and Wess–Zumino–Witten model in the field of supersymmetry and conformal field theory. He was also a ...

*1986 Franz Wegner *1985

Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism ...

*1984 Res Jost *1983

Nicholas Kemmer Nicholas Kemmer (7 December 1911 – 21 October 1998) was a Russian-born nuclear physicist working in Britain, who played an integral and leading edge role in United Kingdom's nuclear programme, and was known as a mentor of Abdus Salam – a ...

*1982

Hans-Arwed Weidenmüller Hans-Arwed Weidenmüller (born 26 July 1933 in Dresden) is a German theoretical physicist, who works primarily in the field of nuclear physics. Life and work Weidenmüller studied in Bonn and from 1956 to 1957 in Heidelberg under J. Hans D. Jensen ...

*1981 Kurt Symanzik *1980 ''not awarded'' *1979 Markus Fierz *1978

Paul Peter Ewald Paul Peter Ewald, FRS (January 23, 1888 in Berlin, Germany – August 22, 1985 in Ithaca, New York) was a German crystallographer and physicist, a pioneer of X-ray diffraction methods. Education Ewald received his early education in the class ...

*1977 Walter Thirring *1976 Ernst Stueckelberg *1975

Gregor Wentzel Gregor Wentzel (17 February 1898 – 12 August 1978) was a German physicist known for development of quantum mechanics. Wentzel, Hendrik Kramers, and Léon Brillouin developed the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation in 1926. In his earl ...

*1974

Léon Van Hove Léon Charles Prudent Van Hove (10 February 1924 – 2 September 1990) was a Belgian physicist and a Director General of CERN. He developed a scientific career spanning mathematics, solid state physics, elementary particle and nuclear physics ...

*1973 Nikolay Bogolyubov *1972 Herbert Fröhlich *1971 ''not awarded'' *1970 Rudolf Haag *1969

Freeman Dyson Freeman John Dyson (15 December 1923 – 28 February 2020) was an English-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum m ...

*1968 Walter Heitler *1967 Harry Lehmann *1966

Gerhart Lüders Gerhart Lüders (25 February 1920 – 31 January 1995) was a German theoretical physicist who worked mainly in quantum field theory and was well known for the discovery and a general proof of the CPT theorem. This theorem is also called the ''Pauli ...

*1965 ''not awarded'' *1964 Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck *1963

Rudolf Peierls Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, (; ; 5 June 1907 – 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied ...

*1962

Ralph Kronig Ralph Kronig (10 March 1904 – 16 November 1995) was a German physicist. He is noted for the discovery of particle spin and for his theory of X-ray absorption spectroscopy. His theories include the Kronig–Penney model, the Coster–Kronig tr ...

*1961

Eugene Wigner Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner ( hu, Wigner Jenő Pál, ; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his con ...

*1960

Lev Landau Lev Davidovich Landau (russian: Лев Дави́дович Ланда́у; 22 January 1908 – 1 April 1968) was a Soviet-Azerbaijani physicist of Jewish descent who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. His a ...

*1959

Oskar Klein Oskar Benjamin Klein (; 15 September 1894 – 5 February 1977) was a Swedish theoretical physicist. Biography Klein was born in Danderyd outside Stockholm, son of the chief rabbi of Stockholm, Gottlieb Klein from Humenné in Kingdom of Hungary ...

*1958

Wolfgang Pauli Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics fo ...

*1957 Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker *1956 Victor Weisskopf *1955

Hans Bethe Hans Albrecht Bethe (; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize ...

*1954

Enrico Fermi Enrico Fermi (; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" an ...

*1953

Walther Bothe Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 – 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born. In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...

*1952

Paul Dirac Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the Unive ...

*1951 James Franck and Gustav Hertz *1950

Peter Debye Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemistry, physical chemist, and List of Nobel laureates in Chemistry, Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Biography Early life Born Petr ...

*1949

Lise Meitner Elise Meitner ( , ; 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on ra ...

and

Otto Hahn Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...

*1948

Max Born Max Born (; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a ...

*1945–1947 ''not awarded'' *1944

Walther Kossel Walther Ludwig Julius Kossel (4 January 1888 – 22 May 1956) was a German physicist known for his theory of the chemical bond ( ionic bond/octet rule), Sommerfeld–Kossel displacement law of atomic spectra, the Kossel-Stranski model for crystal ...

*1943 Friedrich Hund *1942

Pascual Jordan Ernst Pascual Jordan (; 18 October 1902 – 31 July 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matri ...

*1939–1941 ''not awarded'' *1938

Louis de Broglie Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie (, also , or ; 15 August 1892 – 19 March 1987) was a French physicist and aristocrat who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave n ...

*1937

Erwin Schrödinger Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (, ; ; 12 August 1887 – 4 January 1961), sometimes written as or , was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist with Irish citizenship who developed a number of fundamental results in quantum theo ...

*1934–1936 ''not awarded'' *1933

Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series ...

*1932

Max von Laue Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 – 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals. In addition to his scientific endeavors with con ...

*1931

Arnold Sommerfeld Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, (; 5 December 1868 – 26 April 1951) was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and mentored many students for the new era of theoretic ...

*1930

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 ...

*1929

Max Planck Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (, ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918. Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical ...

and

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theor ...

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Planck Medal Awards of the German Physical Society Awards established in 1929 1929 establishments in Germany

List of recipients

See also

References

External links