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Aharonov, Allison, Almquist, Arnold and 16 others
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    James Arthur
    James Greig Arthur CC FRSC FRS (born May 18, 1944) is a Canadian mathematician working on automorphic forms, and former President of the American Mathematical Society. He is a Mossman Chair and Unive...
  • George Mostow (1923 - 2017)
    George Daniel Mostow (July 4, 1923 – April 4, 2017) was an American mathematician, renowned for his contributions to Lie theory. He was the Henry Ford II (emeritus) Professor of Mathematics at Yale U...
  • George Lusztig
    George Lusztig (born Gheorghe Lusztig; May 20, 1946) is an American-Romanian mathematician and Abdun Nur Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a Norbert Wiener Professor ...
  • Elizabeth Diller
    [ Elizabeth Diller ], also known as Liz Diller, is an American architect and partner in Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which she co-founded in 1979. She is also an architecture professor at Princeton Univer...
  • Pamela C Ronald
    Pamela C. Ronald (born 1961) is an American plant pathologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Genome Center and the Department of Plant Pathology, and founding director of the Institute for F...
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The Wolf Prize is an international award granted in Israel, that has been presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for "achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people ... irrespective of nationality, race, colour, religion, sex or political views."

History

The prize is awarded in Israel by the Wolf Foundation, founded by Dr Ricardo Wolf, a German-born inventor and former Cuban ambassador to Israel.

Laureates receive their awards from the President of the State of Israel. The prize presentation takes place at a special ceremony at the Knesset Building (Israel´s Parliament), in Jerusalem. It is awarded in six fields:

  • Agriculture,
  • Chemistry,
  • Mathematics,
  • Medicine,
  • Physics,
  • Arts prize rotates between architecture, music, painting, and sculpture.

Each prize consists of a diploma and US$100,000. The prize is described by the Foundation as being "awarded annually", but is not in fact awarded every year: only six prizes were awarded between 2000–2010 in most fields, and only four in Physics.

The Wolf Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize. The prize in physics has gained a reputation for identifying future winners of the Nobel Prize – from the 26 prizes awarded between 1978 and 2010, fourteen winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, five of those in the following year.

In Medicine, the prize is probably the third most prestigious, after the Nobel Prize and the Lasker Award.

In Mathematics: until the establishment of the Abel Prize, the Wolf Prize was probably the closest equivalent of a " Nobel Prize in Mathematics ", since the more prestigious Fields Medal was only awarded every four years to mathematicians under forty years old.

The Prize in Agriculture has likewise been equated to a " Nobel Prize in Agriculture ".

Awardees== by discipline and year

Wolf Prize in Agriculture

  • 1978: George F. Sprague (United States) for his outstanding research on the genetic amelioration of maize for human welfare; and John Charles Walker (United States) for his research in plant pathology, developing of disease-resistant varieties of major food plants.
  • 1979: Jay L. Lush (United States) for his outstanding and pioneering contributions to the application of genetics to livestock improvement; and Sir Kenneth L. Blaxter (United Kingdom) for his fundamental contributions to the science and practice of ruminant nutrition and livestock production.
  • 1980: Karl Maramorosch (United States) for his pioneering and wide-ranging studies on interactions between insects and disease agents in plants.
  • 1981: John O. Almquist (United States) for his significant contributions to the application of artificial insemination to livestock improvement; and Henry A. Lardy (United States) for his pioneering research on storage and preservation of spermatozoa thus enabling artificial insemination to become a universal practice; and Glenn W. Salisbury (United States) for his outstanding achievements in basic and applied research on artificial insemination.
  • 1982: Wendell L. Roelofs (United States) for his fundamental chemical and biological research on pheromones and their practical use in insect control.
  • 1983/4: Don Kirkham (United States 1908-1998) and Cornelis T. de Wit (Netherlands) for their innovative contributions to the quantitative understanding of soil-water and other environmental interactions influencing crop growth and yield.
  • 1984/5 Robert H. Burris (United States; 1914-2010) for his pioneering fundamental research on the mechanisms of biological nitrogen fixation and its application in crop production.
  • 1986: Sir Ralph Riley (United Kingdom; 1924-1999) and Ernest R. Sears (United States; 1910-1991) for their fundamental research in cytogenetics of wheat, providing the basis for genetic improvement of cereal grains.
  • 1987: Theodor O. Diener (United States; b. 1921) for his discovery and pioneering fundamental research on viroids and his applied work on viroid detection in crops.
  • 1988: Charles Thibault (France; 1919-2003) and Ernest John Christopher Polge (United Kingdom; 1926-2006) for pioneering work in reproductive physiology including cell preservation, fertilization processes, egg biology and embryo manipulations for domestic animal improvement.
  • 1989: Peter M. Biggs (b. 1926) and Michael Elliott (United Kingdom; 1927-2007) for distinguished contributions to basic science and its successful translation into practice in the fields of animal health and crop protection.
  • 1990: Jozef Stefaan Schell (Belgium; 1935-2003) for his pioneering work in genetic transformation of plants, thereby opening up new horizons in basic plant science and breeding.
  • 1991: Shang Fa Yang (Taiwan/United States) for his remarkable contributions to the understanding of the mechanism of biosynthesis, mode of action and applications of the plant hormone, Ethylene.
  • 1992: No award
  • 1993: John E. Casida (United States; b. 1929) for his pioneering studies on the mode of action of insecticides, design of safer pesticides and contributions to the understanding of nerve and muscle function in insects.
  • 1994/5: Carl B. Huffaker (1914-1995) and Perry L. Adkisson (b. 1929) (United States) for their contributions to the development and implementation of environmentally beneficial integrated pest management systems for the protection of agricultural crops.
  • 1995/6: Morris Schnitzer (Canada; b. 1922) and Frank J. Stevenson (United States; b. 1922) for their pioneering contributions to our understanding of the chemistry of soil organic matter and its application to agriculture.
  • 1996/7: Neal L. First (United States; 1930-2014) for his pioneering research in the reproductive biology of livestock.
  • 1998: Ilan Chet (Israel) and Baldur R. Stefansson (Canada; 1917-2002) for their contributions to the environmentally safe development of world agriculture through innovative approaches in breeding and bio-control.
  • 1999: No award
  • 2000: Gurdev Khush (India; b. 1935) for his extraordinary contribution to theoretical research in plant genetics, evolution and breeding especially of rice, with regard to food production and alleviation of hunger.
  • 2001: Roger N. Beachy (b. 1944) and James E. Womack (b. 1941) (United States) for the use of recombinant DNA technology, to revolutionize plant and animal sciences, paving the way for applications to neighboring fields.
  • 2002/3: R. Michael Roberts (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1940) and Fuller W. Bazer (United States; b/ 1938) for discoveries of Interferon tau and other pregnancy-associated proteins, which clarified the biological mystery of signaling between embryo and mother to maintain pregnancy, with profound effects on the efficiency of animal production systems, as well as human health and well-being.
  • 2004: Yuan Longping (China; b. 1930) and Steven D. Tanksley (United States) for innovative development of hybrid rice and discovery of the genetic basis of heterosis in this important food staple.
  • 2005: No award
  • 2006/7: Ronald L. Phillips (United States; b. 1940) and Michel A. J. Georges (Belgium; b. 1959), for groundbreaking discoveries in genetics and genomics, laying the foundations for improvements in crop and livestock breeding, and sparking important advances in plant and animal sciences.
  • 2008: John A. Pickett (United Kingdom; b. 1945), and James H. Tumlinson () and W. Joe Lewis () (United States) for their remarkable discoveries of mechanisms governing plant-insect and plant-plant interactions. Their scientific contributions on chemical ecology have fostered the development of integrated pest management and significantly advanced agricultural sustainability.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: David Baulcombe (United Kingdom; b. 1952) for his pioneering discovery of gene regulation by small inhibitory RNA molecules in plants, which is of profound importance not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole, including the field of medicine.
  • 2011: Harris A. Lewin (United States, b. 1957) for highly significant discoveries, that contribute to both fundamental and practical aspects of animal agriculture; and James R. Cook (United States) for seminal discoveries in plant pathology and soil microbiology that impact crop productivity and disease management.
  • 2012: No award
  • 2013: Joachim Messing (United States/Germany) for innovations in recombinant DNA cloning, which revolutionized agriculture, and for deciphering the genetic codes of crop plants; and Jared Diamond (United States) for pioneering theories of crop domestication, the rise of agriculture and its influences on the development and demise of human societies, and its impact on the ecology of the environment.
  • 2014 Jorge Dubcovsky (United States) and Leif Andersson (Sweden, b. 1954) for their break-through contribution to the study of plants and animals, through the use of cutting-edge genomic technologies.
  • 2015: Linda J. Saif (United States) for her discoveries of novel enteric and respiratory viruses of food animals and humans which have led to her extensive contributions of fundamental knowledge of the gut-mammary immunologic axis and have provided new ways to design vaccines and vaccination strategies.
  • 2016: Trudy Mackay (United States, b. 1952) for her work in quantitative genetics, which studies the interaction between genes, traits and environmental effects.
  • 2017: No award
  • 2018: Gene E. Robinson (United States, b. 1955) for leading the genomics revolution in the organismal and population biology of the honeybee.
  • 2019: David Zilberman (United States, b. 1947) for incorporating biophysical features of agroeconomic systems to develop economic models and econometric decision-making frameworks to answer fundamental agricultural economic and policy questions in several important areas.
  • 2020: Dame Caroline Dean DBE FRS (England, b. 1961) for pioneering discoveries in flowering time control and epigenetic basis of vernalization.
  • 2021: No award
  • 2022: Pamela C. Ronald (United States, b. 1961) "for pioneering work on disease resistance and environmental stress tolerance in rice".
  • 2023: [Martinus Th. “Rien” van Genuchten], (Netherland/Brazil, b. ) "for his groundbreaking work in understanding water flow and predicting contaminant transport in soils".

Wolf Prize in the Arts

Wolf Prize in Chemistry

  • 1978: Carl Djerassi (Austria/United States; 1923-2015), for his work in bioorganic chemistry, application of new spectroscopic techniques, and his support of international cooperation.
  • 1979: Herman Mark (Austria/United States; 1895-1992), for his contributions to understanding the structure and behavior of natural and synthetic polymers.
  • 1980: Henry Eyring (Mexico/United States; 1901-1981), for his development of absolute rate theory and its imaginative applications to chemical and physical processes.
  • 1981: Joseph Chatt (United Kingdom, 1914-1994), for pioneering and fundamental contributions to synthetic transition metal chemistry, particularly transition metal hydrides and dinitrogen complexes.
  • 1982: John Charles Polanyi, (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1986) (Canada; b. 1929) for his studies of chemical reactions in unprecedented detail by developing the infrared chemiluminiscence technique, and for envisaging the chemical laser, and George C. Pimentel (United States; 1922-1989) for development of matrix isolation spectroscopy and for the discovery of photodissociation lasers and chemical lasers.
  • 1983/4: Herbert S. Gutowsky (United States; 1919-2000) for his pioneering work in the development and applications of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in chemistry, and Harden M. McConnell (United States; 1927-2014) for his studies of the electronic structure of molecules through paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and for the introduction and biological applications of spin label techniques, and John S. Waugh (United States; 1929-2014) for his fundamental theoretical and experimental contributions to high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in solids.
  • 1984/5: Rudolph A. Marcus (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1992) (Canada/United States; b. 1923) for his contributions to chemical kinetics, especially the theories of unimolecular reactions and electron transfer reactions.
  • 1986: Elias James Corey (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1990) (United States; b.1928) for outstanding research on the synthesis of many highly complex natural products and the demonstration of novel ways of thinking about such syntheses, and Albert Eschenmoser (Switzerland; b. 1925) for outstanding research on the synthesis, stereochemistry and reaction mechanisms for formation of natural products, especially Vitamin-B12.
  • 1987: Lord David C. Phillips (UK, 1924-1999) and David M. Blow (UK, 1931-2004) for their contributions to protein X-ray crystallography and to the elucidation of structures of enzymes and their mechanisms of action.
  • 1988: Joshua Jortner (Israel; b. 1933) and Raphael David Levine (Israel; b. 1938) for their incisive theoretical studies elucidating energy acquisition and disposal in molecular systems and mechanisms for dynamical selectivity and specificity.
  • 1989: Duilio Arigoni (Switzerland; b. 1928) and Sir Alan R. Battersby (United Kingdom; b. 1925) for their fundamental contributions to the elucidation of the mechanism of enzymic reactions and of the biosynthesis of natural products, in particular the pigments of life.
  • 1990: No award
  • 1991: Richard R. Ernst (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1991) (Switzerland) for his revolutionary contributions to NMR spectroscopy, especially Fourier-transform and two-dimensional NMR and Alexander Pines (Rhodesia/United States; b. 1945) for his revolutionary contributions to NMR spectroscopy, especially multiple-quantum and high-spin NMR.
  • 1992: Sir John Pople (Nobel Prize in Chmistry, 1998) (United Kingdom; 1925-2004) for his outstanding contributions to theoretical chemistry, particularly in developing effective and widely used modern quantum-chemical methods.
  • 1993: Ahmed Hassan Zewail (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1999) (Egypt/United States; b. 1946) for pioneering the development of laser femtochemistry. Using lasers and molecular beams, femtochemistry has made it now possible to probe the evolution of chemical reactions as they actually happen in real time.
  • 1994/5: Richard A. Lerner (United States; b. 1938) and Peter Schultz (United States; b. 1956) for developing catalytic antibodies, thus permitting the catalysis of chemical reactions considered impossible to achieve by classical chemical procedures.
  • 1995/6: Gilbert Stork (United States; b. 1921) and Samuel J. Danishefsky (United States; b. 1936) for designing and developing novel chemical reactions which have opened new avenues to the synthesis of complex molecules, particularly polysaccharides and many other biologically and medicinally important compounds.
  • 1996/7: No award
  • 1998: Gerhard Ertl (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2007) (Germany; b. 1936) and Gabor A. Somorjai (Hungary/United States; b. 1935) for their outstanding contributions to the field of the surface science in general, and for their elucidation of fundamental mechanisms of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at single crystal surfaces in particular.
  • 1999: Raymond U. Lemieux (Canada; 1920-2000), for his fundamental and seminal contributions to the study and synthesis of oligosaccharides and to the elucidation of their role in molecular recognition in biological systems.
  • 2000: Frank Albert Cotton (United States; 1930-2007) for opening up an entirely new phase of transition metal chemistry based on pairs and clusters of metal atoms directly linked by single or multiple bonds.
  • 2001: Henri B. Kagan (France; b. 1935), Ryōji Noyori (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2001) (Japan; b. 1938) and K. Barry Sharpless (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2001) (United States; b. 1941), for their pioneering, creative and crucial work in developing asymmetric catalysis for the synthesis of chiral molecules, greatly increasing mankind's ability to create new products of fundamental and practical importance.
  • 2002/3: No award
  • 2004: Harry B. Gray (United States; b. 1935) for pioneering work in bio-inorganic chemistry, unravelling novel principles of structure and long-range electron transfer in proteins.
  • 2005: Richard N. Zare (United States; b. 1939), for his ingenious applications of laser techniques, for identifying complex mechanisms in molecules, and their use in analytical chemistry.
  • 2006/7: Ada Yonath (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2009) (Israel; b. 1938) and George Feher (United States; b. 1924), for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis.
  • 2008: William E. Moerner (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2014) (United States; b. 1953) and Allen J. Bard (United States; b. 1933), for the ingenious creation of a new field of science, single molecule spectroscopy and electrochemistry, with impact at the nanoscopic regime, from the molecular and cellular domain to complex material systems.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: No award
  • 2011: Stuart A. Rice (United States; b. 1932), Ching W. Tang (United States; b. 1947 in Hong Kong) and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski (Poland/United States; b. 1950), for the deep creative contributions to the chemical sciences in the field of synthesis, properties and an understanding of organic materials.
  • 2012: A. Paul Alivisatos (United States; b. 1989), for his development of the colloidal inorganic nanocrystal as a building block of nanoscience and for making fundamental contributions to controlling the synthesis of these particles, to measuring and understanding their physical properties, and Charles M. Lieber (United States; b. 1959), for his seminal contributions to nanochemistry and particularly the synthesis of single-crystalline semiconductor nanowires, characterization of the fundamental physical properties of nanowires, and their application to electronics, photonics and nanomedicine.
  • 2013: Robert S. Langer (United States; b. 1948), for conceiving and implementing advances in polymer chemistry that provide both controlled drug-release systems and new biomaterials.
  • 2014: Chi-Huey Wong, (Taiwan/United States; b. 1948), for his numerous and original contributions to the development of innovative methods for the programmable and applied synthesis of complex oligosaccharides and glycol-proteins.
  • 2015: No award
  • 2016: Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou (Cyprus/United States; b.1946), for advancing the field of chemical synthesis to the extremes of molecular complexity, linking structure and function and expanding our dominion over the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine, and Stuart Schreiber (United States; b. 1956), for pioneering chemical insights into the logic of signal transduction and gene regulation that led to important, new therapeutics and for advancing chemical biology and medicine through the discovery of small-molecule probes.
  • 2017: Robert G. Bergman (United States) for his discovery of the activation responses of carbon-hydrogen bonds in hydrocarbons by soluble organometallic complexes.
  • 2018: Omar M. Yaghi (Jordan/ United States) for pioneering Reticular Chemistry via Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs) and Makoto Fujita (Japan) for conceiving metal-directed assembly principles leading to large highly porous complexes.
  • 2019: Stephen L. Buchwald (b. 1955) and John F. Hartwig (United States; b. 1964) for pioneering the development of transition metal catalyzed procedures that are broadly applicable and allow carbon-heteroatom bonds of all sorts to be formed with previously unknown efficiency and precision.
  • 2020: No award
  • 2021: Leslie Leiserowitz (Israel, b. 1934) and Meir Lahav (Israel, b. 1936), for collaboratively established the fundamental reciprocal influences of three-dimensional molecular structure upon structures of organic crystals.
  • 2022: Bonnie Lynn Bassler (United States; b. 1962), Caroline Ruth Bertozzi (United States; b. 1966), and Benjamin Franklin Cravatt III (United States; b. 1970) for their seminal contributions to understanding the chemistry of cellular communication and inventing chemical methodologies to study the role of carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins in such biological processes.
  • 2023: Awarded for pioneering discoveries that illuminate the functions and pathological dysfunctions of RNA and proteins and for creating strategies to harness the capabilities of these biopolymers in new ways to ameliorate human diseases; to [%E2%80%9D'Chuan He] (United States, b. 1972 in China), for discovering reversible RNA methylation and its role in the regulation of gene expression, [Jeffery W. Kelly] (United States, b. 1960), for developing a clinical strategy to ameliorate pathological protein aggregation, and [Hiroaki Suga] (Japan, b, ) for developing RNA-based catalysts that revolutionized the discovery of bioactive peptides.

Wolf Prize in Mathematics

  • 1978: Israel Gelfand (Russia; 1913-2009) for his work in functional analysis, group representation, and for his seminal contributions to many areas of mathematics and its applications, and Carl L. Siegel (Germany; 1896-1981) for his contributions to the theory of numbers, theory of several complex variables, and celestial mechanics.
  • 1979: Jean Leray (France) for pioneering work on the development and application of topological methods to the study of differential equations, and André Weil (France) for his inspired introduction of algebraic-geometric methods to the theory of numbers.
  • 1980: Henri Cartan (France) for pioneering work in algebraic topology, complex variables, homological algebra and inspired leadership of a generation of mathematicians, and Andrey Kolmogorov (Russia; 1903-1987), for deep and original discoveries in Fourier analysis, probability theory, ergodic theory and dynamical systems.
  • 1981: Lars Ahlfors (Finland) for seminal discoveries and the creation of powerful new methods in geometric function theory, and Oscar Zariski (United States) creator of the modern approach to algebraic geometry, by its fusion with commutative algebra.
  • 1982: Hassler Whitney (United States) for his fundamental work in algebraic topology, differential geometry and differential topology; and Mark Krein (Soviet Union) for his fundamental contributions to functional analysis and its applications.
  • 1983/4: Shiing-Shen Chern (United States) for outstanding contributions to global differential geometry, which have profoundly influenced all mathematics; and Paul Erdős (Hungary) for his numerous contributions to number theory, combinatorics, probability, set theory and mathematical analysis, and for personally stimulating mathematicians the world over.
  • 1984/5: Kunihiko Kodaira (Japan) for his outstanding contributions to the study of complex manifolds and algebraic varieties; and Hans Lewy (West Germany/United States) for initiating many, now classic and essential, developments in partial differential equations.
  • 1986: Samuel Eilenberg (United States; 1913-1998) for his fundamental work in algebraic topology and homological algebra; and Atle Selberg (Norway; 1917-2007) for his profound and original work on number theory and on discrete groups and automorphic forms.
  • 1987: Kiyoshi Itō (Japan) for his fundamental contributions to pure and applied probability theory, especially the creation of the stochastic differential and integral calculus; and Peter Lax (United States) for his outstanding contributions to many areas of analysis and applied mathematics.
  • 1988: Friedrich Hirzebruch (West Germany) for outstanding work combining topology, algebraic geometry and differential geometry, and algebraic number theory; and for his stimulation of mathematical cooperation and research; and Lars Hörmander (Sweden) for fundamental work in modern analysis, in particular, the application of pseudo-differential operators and Fourier integral operators to linear partial differential equations.
  • 1989: Alberto Calderón (Argentina) for his groundbreaking work on singular integral operators and their application to important problems in partial differential equations; and John Milnor (United States) for ingenious and highly original discoveries in geometry, which have opened important new vistas in topology from the algebraic, combinatorial, and differentiable viewpoint.
  • 1990: Ennio de Giorgi (Italy; 1928-1996) for his innovating ideas and fundamental achievements in partial differential equations and calculus of variations; and Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (Israel/United States) for his fundamental contributions in the fields of homogeneous complex domains, discrete groups, representation theory and automorphic forms.
  • 1991: No award
  • 1992: Lennart Carleson (Sweden; b. 1928) for his fundamental contributions to Fourier analysis, complex analysis, quasi-conformal mappings and dynamical systems, and John G. Thompson (United States; b. 1932) for his profound contributions to all aspects of finite group theory and connections with other branches of mathematics.
  • 1993: Mikhail Gromov (Russia/France; b. 1943) for his revolutionary contributions to global Riemannian and symplectic geometry, algebraic topology, geometric group theory and the theory of partial differential equations; and Jacques Tits (Belgium/France; b. 1930) for his pioneering and fundamental contributions to the theory of the structure of algebraic and other classes of groups and in particular for the theory of buildings.
  • 1994/5: Jürgen Moser (Germany/United States; 1928-1999) for his fundamental work on stability in Hamiltonian mechanics and his profound and influential contributions to nonlinear differential equations.
  • 1995/6: Robert Langlands (Canada; b. 1936) for his path-blazing work and extraordinary insight in the fields of number theory, automorphic forms and group representation; and Andrew Wiles (United Kingdom; b. 1953) for spectacular contributions to number theory and related fields, major advances on fundamental conjectures, and for settling Fermat's last theorem.
  • 1996/7: Joseph B. Keller (United States; b. 1923) for his profound and innovative contributions, in particular to electromagnetic, optical, and acoustic wave propagation and to fluid, solid, quantum and statistical mechanics; and Yakov G. Sinai (Russia/United States; b. 1935) for his fundamental contributions to mathematically rigorous methods in statistical mechanics and the ergodic theory of dynamical systems and their applications in physics.
  • 1998: No award
  • 1999: László Lovász (Hungary/United States; b. 1948) for his outstanding contributions to combinatorics, theoretical computer science and combinatorial optimization; and Elias M. Stein (United States; b. 1935 in Antwerp) for his contributions to classical and Euclidean Fourier analysis and for his exceptional impact on a new generation of analysts through his eloquent teaching and writing.
  • 2000: Raoul Bott (Hungary/United States; 1923-2005) for his deep discoveries in topology and differential geometry and their applications to Lie groups, differential operators and mathematical physics; and Jean-Pierre Serre (France; b. 1926) for his many fundamental contributions to topology, algebraic geometry, algebra, and number theory and for his inspirational lectures and writing.
  • 2001: Vladimir Arnold (Russia; 1937-2010) for his deep and influential work in a multitude of areas of mathematics, including dynamical systems, differential equations, and singularity theory; and Saharon Shelah (Israel; b. 1945) for his many fundamental contributions to mathematical logic and set theory, and their applications within other parts of mathematics.
  • 2002/3: Mikio Sato (Japan; b. 1928) for his creation of algebraic analysis, including hyperfunction theory and microfunction theory, holonomic quantum field theory, and a unified theory of soliton equations; and John Tate (United States; b. 1925) for his creation of fundamental concepts in algebraic number theory.
  • 2004: No award
  • 2005: Gregory Margulis (Russia; b. 1946) for his monumental contributions to algebra, in particular to the theory of lattices in semi-simple Lie groups, and striking applications of this to ergodic theory, representation theory, number theory, combinatorics, and measure theory; and Sergei Novikov (Russia; b. 1938) for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to algebraic and differential topology, and to mathematical physics, notably the introduction of algebraic-geometric methods.
  • 2006/7: Stephen Smale (United States; b. 1930) for his groundbreaking contributions that have played a fundamental role in shaping differential topology, dynamical systems, mathematical economics, and other subjects in mathematics; and Hillel Furstenberg (United States/Israel; b. 1935) for his profound contributions to ergodic theory, probability, topological dynamics, analysis on symmetric spaces and homogeneous flows.
  • 2008: Pierre Deligne (Belgium) for his work on mixed Hodge theory; the Weil conjectures; the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence; and for his contributions to arithmetic; and Phillip A. Griffiths (United States; b. 1938) for his work on variations of Hodge structures; the theory of periods of abelian integrals; and for his contributions to complex differential geometry; and David B. Mumford (United States; b. 1937) for his work on algebraic surfaces; on geometric invariant theory; and for laying the foundations of the modern algebraic theory of moduli of curves and theta functions.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: Shing-Tung Yau (United States) for his work in geometric analysis that has had a profound and dramatic impact on many areas of geometry and physics, and Dennis P. Sullivan (United States) for his innovative contributions to algebraic topology and conformal dynamics.
  • 2011: No award
  • 2012: Michael Aschbacher (United States; b. 1944) for his work on the theory of finite groups, and Luis Caffarelli (Argentina/United States, b. 1948) for his work on partial differential equations.
  • 2013: George D. Mostow (United States) for his fundamental and pioneering contribution to geometry and Lie group theory, and Michael Artin (United States, b. 1934) for his fundamental contributions to algebraic geometry. His mathematical accomplishments are astonishing for their depth and their scope.
  • 2014 Peter Sarnak (South Africa/United States, b. 1953) for his deep contributions in analysis, number theory, geometry, and combinatorics.
  • 2015: James G. Arthur (Canada, b. 1944) for his monumental work on the trace formula and his fundamental contributions to the theory of automorphic representations of reductive groups.
  • 2016: No award
  • 2017: Richard Schoen (United States, b. 1950) for his contributions to geometric analysis and the understanding of the interconnectedness of partial differential equations and differential geometry, and Charles Fefferman (United States, b.1949) for his contributions in a number of mathematical areas including complex multivariate analysis, partial differential equations and sub-elliptical problems.
  • 2018: Alexander Beilinson (Russia/United States, b. 1957) and Vladimir Drinfeld (Ukraine/United States, b. 1954) for their work that has made significant progress at the interface of geometry and mathematical physics.
  • 2019: Jean-Francois Le Gall (France, b. 1959) for his several deep and elegant contributions to the theory of stochastic processes, and Gregory Lawler (United States, b. 1955) for his comprehensive and pioneering research on erased loops and random walks.
  • 2020: Yakov Eliashberg (Russia/USA, b. 1946) and Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson (England, b.1957) for their contribution to differential geometry and topology.
  • 2021: No award
  • 2022: George Lusztig (United States--Romania; b. 1946) for Groundbreaking contributions to representation theory and related areas. He was described as "one if the greatest mathematicians of our times."
  • 2023: [Baroness Ingrid Daubechies], (Belgium/United States b. 1954) “for work in wavelet theory and applied harmonic analysis”.

Wolf Prize in Medicine

  • 1978: George D. Snell (United States; 1905-1996), for discovery of H-2 antigens, which codes for major transplantation antigens and the onset of the immune response, and Jean Dausset (France; 1916-2009) for discovering the HL-A system, the major histocompatibility complex in man and its primordial role in organ transplantation; and Jon J. van Rood (Netherlands; b. 1926) for his contribution to the understanding of the complexity of the HL-A system in man and its implications in transplantation and in disease.
  • 1979: Roger Wolcott Sperry, (United States; 1913-1994) for his studies on the functional differentiation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain; and Arvid Carlsson (Sweden; b. 1923), for his work which established the role of dopamine as a neurotransmitter; and Oleh Hornykiewicz (Austria; b. 1927 in Ukraine) for opening a new approach in the control of Parkinson's disease by L-Dopa.
  • 1980: César Milstein (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1984) (Argentina/United Kingdom; 1927-2002), Leo Sachs (Israel; 1924-2013) and James L. Gowans (United Kingdom; b. 1924) for their contributions to knowledge of the function and dysfunction of the body cells through their studies on the immunological role of the lymphocytes, the development of specific antibodies and the elucidation of mechanisms governing the control and differentiation of normal and cancer cells.
  • 1981: Barbara McClintock (United States) for her imaginative and important contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure behaviour and function, and for her identification and description of transposable genetic (mobile) elements; and Stanley N. Cohen (United States; b. 1935) for his concepts underlying genetic engineering; for constructing a biologically functional hybrid plasmid, and for achieving actual expression of a foreign gene implanted in E. coli by the recombinant DNA method.
  • 1982: Jean-Pierre Changeux (France; b. 1936), for the isolation, purification and characterization of the acetylcholine receptor; and Solomon H. Snyder (United States, b. 1938) for the development of the ways to label neurotransmitter receptors which provide tools to describe their properties; and James W. Black (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1988) (United Kingdom; 1924-2010) for developing agents which block beta adrenergic and histamine receptors.
  • 1983/4: No award
  • 1984/5: Donald F. Steiner (United States; 1930-2014) for his discoveries concerning the bio-synthesis and processing of insulin which have had profound implications for basic biology and clinical medicine.
  • 1986: Osamu Hayaishi (Japan; 1920-2015) for his discovery of the oxygenase enzymes and elucidation of their structure and biological importance.
  • 1987: Pedro Cuatrecasas (United States; b. 1936) and Meir Wilchek (Israel; b. 1935) for the invention and development of affinity chromatography and its applications to biomedical sciences.
  • 1988: Henri G. Hers (Belgium; 1923-2008) and Elizabeth F. Neufeld (United States; b. 1928) for the biochemical elucidation of lysosomal storage diseases and the resulting contributions to biology, pathology, prenatal diagnosis and therapeutics.
  • 1989: John Gurdon (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2012) (United Kingdom; b. 1933), for his introduction of the xenopus oocyte into molecular biology and his demonstration that the nucleus of a differentiated cell and of the egg differ in expression but not in the content of genetic material; and Edward B. Lewis (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1995) (United States; 1918-2004) for his demonstration and exploration of the genetic control of the development of body segments by homeotic genes.
  • 1990: Maclyn McCarty (United States; 1911-2005), for his part in the demonstration that the transforming factor in bacteria is due to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and the concomitant discovery that the genetic material is composed of DNA.
  • 1991: Seymour Benzer (United States; 1921-2007) for having generated a new field of molecular neurogenetics by his pioneering research on the dissection of the nervous system and behavior by gene mutations.
  • 1992: M. Judah Folkman (United States; 1933-2008) for his discoveries which originated the concept and developed the field of angiogenesis research.
  • 1993: No award
  • 1994/5: Michael J. Berridge (United Kingdom; b.1938) and Yasutomi Nishizuka (Japan; 1932-2004) for their discoveries concerning cellular transmembrane signalling involving phospholipids and calcium.
  • 1995/6 Stanley B. Prusiner (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1997) (United States; b. 1942) for discovering prions, a new class of pathogens that cause important neurodegenerative disease by inducing changes in protein structure.
  • 1997: Mary Frances Lyon (United Kingdom; 1925-2014) for her hypothesis concerning the random inactivation of X-chromosomes in mammals.
  • 1998: Michael Sela (Israel; b. 1924 (Poland)) and Ruth Arnon (Israel) for their major discoveries in the field of immunology.
  • 1999: Eric R. Kandel (United States; b. 1929) for the elucidation of the organismic, cellular and molecular mechanisms whereby short-term memory is converted to a long-term form.
  • 2000: No award
  • 2001: Avram Hershko (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2004) (Israel) and Alexander Varshavsky (Russia/United States; b. 1946) for the discovery of the ubiquitin system of intracellular protein degradation and the crucial functions of this system in cellular regulation.
  • 2002/3: Ralph L. Brinster (United States; b/ 1932) for the development of procedures to manipulate mouse ova and embryos, which has enabled transgenesis and its applications in mice; and Mario Capecchi (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2007) (Italy/United States; 1937) and Oliver Smithies (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2007) (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1925) for their contribution to the development of gene-targeting, enabling elucidation of gene function in mice.
  • 2004: Robert A. Weinberg (United States; b. 1942) for his discovery that cancer cells including human tumor cells, carry somatically mutated genes-oncogenes that operate to drive their malignant proliferation; and Roger Y. Tsien (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2008) (United States; b. 1952) for his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction.
  • 2005: Alexander Levitzki (Israel) for pioneering signal transduction therapy and for developing tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer and a range of other diseases; and Anthony R. Hunter (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1943) for the discovery of protein kinases that phosphorylate tyrosine residues in proteins, critical for the regulation of a wide variety of cellular events, including malignant transformation ; and Anthony J. Pawson (United Kingdom/Canada; 1952-2013) for his discovery of protein domains essential for mediating protein-protein interactions in cellular signaling pathways, and the insights this research has provided into cancer.
  • 2006/7 No award
  • 2008: Howard Cedar and Aharon Razin (Israel) for their fundamental contributions to our understanding of the role of DNA methylation in the control of gene expression.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: Axel Ullrich, (Germany; b. 1943) for groundbreaking cancer research that has led to development of new drugs.
  • 2011: Shinya Yamanaka (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2012) (Japan; b.1962) and Rudolf Jaenisch (Germany/United States; b. 1942) for the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from skin cells (SY) and demonstration that iPS cells can be used to cure genetic disease in a mammal, thus establishing their therapeutic potential (RJ).
  • 2012: Ronald M. Evans (United States; b. 1949) for his discovery of the gene super-family encoding nuclear receptors and elucidating the mechanism of action of this class of receptors.
  • 2013: No award
  • 2014: Nahum Sonenberg (Israel/Canada; b. 1946) for his discovery of the proteins that control the protein expression mechanism and their operation; and Gary Ruvkun (United States; b. 1951) and Victor Ambros (United States; b. 1953) for the discovery of the micro-RNA molecules that play a key role in controlling gene expression in natural processes and disease development.
  • 2015: John Kappler (United States; b. 1943), Philippa Marrack (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1945) and Jeffrey Ravetch (United States; b. 1951) for major contributions to the understanding of the key antigen-specific molecules, the T cell receptor for antigen and antibodies and how these molecules participate in immune recognition and effector function.
  • 2016: C. Ronald Kahn (United States; b. 1944), for pioneering studies defining insulin signaling and its alterations in disease; and Lewis C. Cantley (United States; b. 1949) for discovery of phosphoinositide-3 kinases and their roles in physiology and disease.
  • 2017: James P. Allison (United States) for a revolution in cancer treatment due to the discovery of the immune control barrier.
  • 2018: No award
  • 2019: Jeffrey M. Friedman (United States, b. 1954) for the discovery of Leptin and the entirely new endocrine system controlling body weight (and many other processes).
  • 2020: Emmanuelle Charpentier (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2020) (France, b. 1968) for deciphering and repurposing the bacterial CRISPR/Cas9 immune system for genome editing and Jennifer Doudna (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2020) (United States, b. 1964) for or revealing the medicine-revolutionizing mechanism of bacterial immunity via RNA-guided genome editing.
  • 2021: Awarded for fundamental discoveries in RNA biology that have the potential to better human lives: to Joan Steitz (United States, b. 1941) for ground-breaking discoveries on RNA processing and its function, to Lynne Maquat (United States, b. ) for discovering a mechanism that destroys mutant mRNA in cells – “non-sense mediated mRNA decay (NMD)”, and to Adrian Krainer (United States, b. ) for his fundamental mechanistic discoveries on RNA splicing leading to a world’s first treatment for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).
  • 2022: No award
  • 2023: Daniel J. Drucker (Canada, b. 1956) for pioneering work in elucidating the mechanisms and therapeutic potential of enteroendocrine hormones.

Wolf Prize in Physics

  • 1978: Chien-Shiung Wu (United States), for her explorations of the weak interaction, helping establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force.
  • 1979: George Eugene Uhlenbeck (Netherlands / United States; 1900-1988) for his discovery, jointly with the late S. A. Goudsmit, of the electron spin and Giuseppe Occhialini (Italy; 1927-1993) for his contributions to the discoveries of electron pair production and of the charged pion.
  • 1980: Michael E. Fisher (United Kingdom; b. 1931) and Leo P. Kadanoff (1937-2015) and Kenneth G. Wilson (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1982) (1936-2013) (United States) for pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter.
  • 1981: Freeman J. Dyson (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1923), and Gerard 't Hooft (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1999) (Netherlands; b. 1946), and Victor F. Weisskopf (Austria/United States; 1908-2002) for their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields.
  • 1982: Leon M. Lederman (b. 1922) and Martin Lewis Perl (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1995) (United States; 1927-2014) for their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of quarks and leptons.
  • 1983/4: Erwin L. Hahn (United States; b. 1921) for his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency; and Peter B. Hirsch (United Kingdom; b. 1925) for his development of the utilization of the transmission electron microscope as a universal instrument to study the structure of crystalline matter; and Theodore H. Maiman (United States; 1927-2007) for his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser.
  • 1985: Conyers Herring (United States; 1914-2009) and Philippe Nozieres (France; b. 1932) for their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals.
  • 1986: Mitchell J. Feigenbaum (United States; b. 1944) for his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos; and Albert J. Libchaber (France/United States; b. 1934) for his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition to turbulence and chaos in dynamic systems.
  • 1987: Herbert Friedman (United States; 1916-2000) for pioneering investigations in solar X-rays. and Bruno B. Rossi (Italy/United states; 1905-1993) and Riccardo Giacconi (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2002) (Italy/United States; b. 1931) for the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes.
  • 1988: Roger Penrose and Stephen W. Hawking (United Kingdom) for their brilliant development of the theory of general relativity, in which they have shown the necessity for cosmological singularities and have elucidated the physics of black holes. In this work they have greatly enlarged our understanding of the origin and possible fate of the Universe.
  • 1989: No award
  • 1990: Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1991) (France) and David J. Thouless (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2016) (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1934) for a wide variety of pioneering contributions to our understanding of the organization of complex condensed matter systems, de Gennes especially for his work on macromolecular matter and liquid crystals and Thouless for his on disordered and low-dimensional systems.
  • 1991: Maurice Goldhaber (United States) and Valentine L. Telegdi (Switzerland/United States; 1922-2006) for their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons.
  • 1992: Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1993) ( United States; b. 1941) for his discovery of an orbiting radio pulsar and its exploitation to verify the general theory of relativity to high precision.
  • 1993: Benoît Mandelbrot (France/United States 1924-2010) by recognizing the widespread occurrence of fractals and developing mathematical tools for describing them, he has changed our view of nature.
  • 1994/95: Vitaly L. Ginzburg (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2003) (Russia; 1916-2009) for his contributions to the theory of superconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics: and Yoichiro Nambu (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2008) (Japan/United States; 1921-2015) for his contribution to elementary particle theory, including recognition of the role played by spontaneous symmetry breaking in analogy with superconductivity theory, and the discovery of the color symmetry of the strong interactions.
  • 1995/96: No award
  • 1996/97: John Archibald Wheeler (United States; 1911-2008) for his seminal contributions to black holes physics, to quantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering and nuclear fission.
  • 1998: Yakir Aharonov (Israel; b. 1932) and Michael V. Berry (United Kingdom; b. 1941) for the discovery of quantum topological and geometrical phases. specifically the Aharonov–Bohm effect, the Berry phase, and their incorporation into many fields of physics.
  • 1999: Dan Shechtman (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2011) (Israel; b. 1941) for the experimental discovery of quasi-crystals, non-periodic solids having long-range order, which inspired the exploration of a new fundamental state of matter.
  • 2000: Raymond Davis, Jr. (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2002) (United States; 1914-2006) and Masatoshi Koshiba (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2002) (Japan; b. 1926) for their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy.
  • 2001: No award
  • 2002/03: Bertrand I. Halperin (United States; b. 1941) and Anthony J. Leggett (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2003) (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1936) for key insights into the broad range of condensed matter physics: Leggett on superfluidity of the light helium isotope and macroscopic quantum phenomena; and Halperin on two- dimensional melting, disordered systems and strongly interacting electrons.
  • 2004: Robert Brout (United stated/Belgium; 1928-2011) and François Englert (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2013) (Belgium; b. 1932) and Peter W. Higgs (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2013) (United Kingdom; b. 1929) for pioneering work that has led to the insight of mass generation whenever a local gauge symmetry is realized asymmetrically in the world of sub-atomic particles.
  • 2005: Daniel Kleppner (United States; b. 1932) for groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on the hydrogen maser, Rydberg atoms and Bose–Einstein condensation.
  • 2006/07: Albert Fert (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2007) (France; b. 1938) and Peter Grünberg (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2007) (Germany; b. 1939) for their independent discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon (GMR), thereby launching a new field of research and applications known as spintronics, which utilizes the spin of the electron to store and transport information.
  • 2008: No award
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: John F. Clauser (United States; b. 1942) and Alain Aspect (France; b. 1947) and Anton Zeilinger (Austria; b. 1945) for their fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell's inequalities, or extensions thereof, using entangled quantum states.
  • 2011: [ Maximilian Haider] (Austria; b. ) and [ Harald Rose] (Germany; b. ) and [ Knut Urban] (Germany; b. ) for their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science.
  • 2012: Jacob D. Bekenstein יעקב בקנשטיין (Israel; 1947-2015) for his work on black holes.
  • 2013: [ Peter Zoller] (Austria; b. 1952), [ Ignacio Cirac] (Spain; b. 1965) for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
  • 2014: No award
  • 2015: [ James D. Bjorken] (United States; b. 1934) for predicting scaling in deep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon’s pointlike constituents. He made a crucial contribution for elucidating the nature of the strong force; and Robert P. Kirshner (United States; b. 1949) for creating the group, environment and directions that allowed his graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to uncover the acceleration in the expansion of the universe.
  • 2016: Yoseph Imry (Israel) for his work in mesoscopic physics – a branch of physics that studies objects that are smaller than macroscopic (visible to the naked eye) objects but bigger than atoms.
  • 2017: Michel Mayor (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2019) and Didier Queloz (Switzerland) for the discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting around a star similar to the sun.
  • 2018: Charles H. Bennett (United States) and Gilles Brassard (Canada) for their collaborative work in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science.
  • 2019: No award
  • 2020: Rafi Bistritzer (Israel, b. 1974), Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (Spain , b. 1976) and Allan H. MacDonald (Canada, b. 1951) for pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene.
  • 2021: Giorgio Parisi (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2021) (Italy, b. 1948) for ground-breaking discoveries in disordered systems, particle physics and statistical physics.
  • 2022: Anne L'Huillier (France-Sweden; b. 1958), Paul Bruce Corkum OC OOnt FRSC FRS (Canada; b. 1943), and Ferenc Krausz (Hungary-Austria-Germany; b. 1962) for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics.

The Wolf Prize is an international award granted in Israel, that has been presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for "achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people ... irrespective of nationality, race, colour, religion, sex or political views."

History

The prize is awarded in Israel by the Wolf Foundation, founded by Dr Ricardo Wolf, a German-born inventor and former Cuban ambassador to Israel.

Laureates receive their awards from the President of the State of Israel. The prize presentation takes place at a special ceremony at the Knesset Building (Israel´s Parliament), in Jerusalem. It is awarded in six fields:

  • Agriculture,
  • Chemistry,
  • Mathematics,
  • Medicine,
  • Physics,
  • Arts prize rotates between architecture, music, painting, and sculpture.

Each prize consists of a diploma and US$100,000. The prize is described by the Foundation as being "awarded annually", but is not in fact awarded every year: only six prizes were awarded between 2000–2010 in most fields, and only four in Physics.

The Wolf Prizes in Physics and Chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize. The prize in physics has gained a reputation for identifying future winners of the Nobel Prize – from the 26 prizes awarded between 1978 and 2010, fourteen winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, five of those in the following year.

In medicine, the prize is probably the third most prestigious, after the Nobel Prize and the Lasker Award.

In Mathematics: until the establishment of the Abel Prize, the Wolf Prize was probably the closest equivalent of a " Nobel Prize in Mathematics ", since the more prestigious Fields Medal was only awarded every four years to mathematicians under forty years old.

The Prize in Agriculture has likewise been equated to a " Nobel Prize in Agriculture ".

Awardees

by discipline and year

Wolf Prize in Agriculture

  • 1978: George F. Sprague (United States) for his outstanding research on the genetic amelioration of maize for human welfare; and John Charles Walker (United States) for his research in plant pathology, developing of disease-resistant varieties of major food plants.
  • 1979: Jay L. Lush (United States) for his outstanding and pioneering contributions to the application of genetics to livestock improvement; and Sir Kenneth L. Blaxter (United Kingdom) for his fundamental contributions to the science and practice of ruminant nutrition and livestock production.
  • 1980: Karl Maramorosch (United States) for his pioneering and wide-ranging studies on interactions between insects and disease agents in plants.
  • 1981: John O. Almquist (United States) for his significant contributions to the application of artificial insemination to livestock improvement; and Henry A. Lardy (United States) for his pioneering research on storage and preservation of spermatozoa thus enabling artificial insemination to become a universal practice; and Glenn W. Salisbury (United States) for his outstanding achievements in basic and applied research on artificial insemination.
  • 1982: Wendell L. Roelofs (United States) for his fundamental chemical and biological research on pheromones and their practical use in insect control.
  • 1983/4: Don Kirkham (United States 1908-1998) and Cornelis T. de Wit (Netherlands) for their innovative contributions to the quantitative understanding of soil-water and other environmental interactions influencing crop growth and yield.
  • 1984/5 Robert H. Burris (United States; 1914-2010) for his pioneering fundamental research on the mechanisms of biological nitrogen fixation and its application in crop production.
  • 1986: Sir Ralph Riley (United Kingdom; 1924-1999) and Ernest R. Sears (United States; 1910-1991) for their fundamental research in cytogenetics of wheat, providing the basis for genetic improvement of cereal grains.
  • 1987: Theodor O. Diener (United States; b. 1921) for his discovery and pioneering fundamental research on viroids and his applied work on viroid detection in crops.
  • 1988: Charles Thibault (France; 1919-2003) and Ernest John Christopher Polge (United Kingdom; 1926-2006) for pioneering work in reproductive physiology including cell preservation, fertilization processes, egg biology and embryo manipulations for domestic animal improvement.
  • 1989: Peter M. Biggs (b. 1926) and Michael Elliott (United Kingdom; 1927-2007) for distinguished contributions to basic science and its successful translation into practice in the fields of animal health and crop protection.
  • 1990: Jozef Stefaan Schell (Belgium; 1935-2003) for his pioneering work in genetic transformation of plants, thereby opening up new horizons in basic plant science and breeding.
  • 1991: Shang Fa Yang (Taiwan/United States) for his remarkable contributions to the understanding of the mechanism of biosynthesis, mode of action and applications of the plant hormone, Ethylene.
  • 1992: No award
  • 1993: John E. Casida (United States; b. 1929) for his pioneering studies on the mode of action of insecticides, design of safer pesticides and contributions to the understanding of nerve and muscle function in insects.
  • 1994/5: Carl B. Huffaker (1914-1995) and Perry L. Adkisson (b. 1929) (United States) for their contributions to the development and implementation of environmentally beneficial integrated pest management systems for the protection of agricultural crops.
  • 1995/6: Morris Schnitzer (Canada; b. 1922) and Frank J. Stevenson (United States; b. 1922) for their pioneering contributions to our understanding of the chemistry of soil organic matter and its application to agriculture.
  • 1996/7: Neal L. First (United States; 1930-2014) for his pioneering research in the reproductive biology of livestock.
  • 1998: Ilan Chet (Israel) and Baldur R. Stefansson (Canada; 1917-2002) for their contributions to the environmentally safe development of world agriculture through innovative approaches in breeding and bio-control.
  • 1999: No award
  • 2000: Gurdev Khush (India; b. 1935) for his extraordinary contribution to theoretical research in plant genetics, evolution and breeding especially of rice, with regard to food production and alleviation of hunger.
  • 2001: Roger N. Beachy (b. 1944) and James E. Womack (b. 1941) (United States) for the use of recombinant DNA technology, to revolutionize plant and animal sciences, paving the way for applications to neighboring fields.
  • 2002/3: R. Michael Roberts (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1940) and Fuller W. Bazer (United States; b/ 1938) for discoveries of Interferon tau and other pregnancy-associated proteins, which clarified the biological mystery of signaling between embryo and mother to maintain pregnancy, with profound effects on the efficiency of animal production systems, as well as human health and well-being.
  • 2004: Yuan Longping (China; b. 1930) and Steven D. Tanksley (United States) for innovative development of hybrid rice and discovery of the genetic basis of heterosis in this important food staple.
  • 2005: No award
  • 2006/7: Ronald L. Phillips (United States; b. 1940) and Michel A. J. Georges (Belgium; b. 1959), for groundbreaking discoveries in genetics and genomics, laying the foundations for improvements in crop and livestock breeding, and sparking important advances in plant and animal sciences.
  • 2008: John A. Pickett (United Kingdom; b. 1945), and James H. Tumlinson () and W. Joe Lewis () (United States) for their remarkable discoveries of mechanisms governing plant-insect and plant-plant interactions. Their scientific contributions on chemical ecology have fostered the development of integrated pest management and significantly advanced agricultural sustainability.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: David Baulcombe (United Kingdom; b. 1952) for his pioneering discovery of gene regulation by small inhibitory RNA molecules in plants, which is of profound importance not only for agriculture, but also for biology as a whole, including the field of medicine.
  • 2011: Harris A. Lewin (United States, b. 1957) for highly significant discoveries, that contribute to both fundamental and practical aspects of animal agriculture; and James R. Cook (United States) for seminal discoveries in plant pathology and soil microbiology that impact crop productivity and disease management.
  • 2012: No award
  • 2013: Joachim Messing (United States/Germany) for innovations in recombinant DNA cloning, which revolutionized agriculture, and for deciphering the genetic codes of crop plants; and Jared Diamond (United States) for pioneering theories of crop domestication, the rise of agriculture and its influences on the development and demise of human societies, and its impact on the ecology of the environment.
  • 2014 Jorge Dubcovsky (United States) and Leif Andersson (Sweden, b. 1954) for their break-through contribution to the study of plants and animals, through the use of cutting-edge genomic technologies.
  • 2015: Linda J. Saif (United States) for her discoveries of novel enteric and respiratory viruses of food animals and humans which have led to her extensive contributions of fundamental knowledge of the gut-mammary immunologic axis and have provided new ways to design vaccines and vaccination strategies.
  • 2016: Trudy Mackay (United States, b. 1952) for her work in quantitative genetics, which studies the interaction between genes, traits and environmental effects.
  • 2017: No award
  • 2018: Gene E. Robinson (United States, b. 1955) for leading the genomics revolution in the organismal and population biology of the honeybee.
  • 2019: David Zilberman (United States, b. 1947) or incorporating biophysical features of agroeconomic systems to develop economic models and econometric decision-making frameworks to answer fundamental agricultural economic and policy questions in several important areas.

Wolf Prize in the Arts

Wolf Prize in Chemistry

  • 1978: Carl Djerassi (Austria/United States; 1923-2015), for his work in bioorganic chemistry, application of new spectroscopic techniques, and his support of international cooperation.
  • 1979: Herman Mark (Austria/United States; 1895-1992), for his contributions to understanding the structure and behavior of natural and synthetic polymers.
  • 1980: Henry Eyring (Mexico/United States; 1901-1981), for his development of absolute rate theory and its imaginative applications to chemical and physical processes.
  • 1981: Joseph Chatt (United Kingdom, 1914-1994), for pioneering and fundamental contributions to synthetic transition metal chemistry, particularly transition metal hydrides and dinitrogen complexes.
  • 1982: John Charles Polanyi' (Canada; b. 1929) for his studies of chemical reactions in unprecedented detail by developing the infrared chemiluminiscence technique, and for envisaging the chemical laser, and George C. Pimentel (United States; 1922-1989) for development of matrix isolation spectroscopy and for the discovery of photodissociation lasers and chemical lasers.
  • 1983/4: Herbert S. Gutowsky (United States; 1919-2000) for his pioneering work in the development and applications of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in chemistry, and Harden M. McConnell (United States; 1927-2014) for his studies of the electronic structure of molecules through paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy and for the introduction and biological applications of spin label techniques, and John S. Waugh (United States; 1929-2014) for his fundamental theoretical and experimental contributions to high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in solids.
  • 1984/5: Rudolph A. Marcus (Canada/United States; b. 1923) for his contributions to chemical kinetics, especially the theories of unimolecular reactions and electron transfer reactions.
  • 1986: Elias James Corey (United States; b.1928) for outstanding research on the synthesis of many highly complex natural products and the demonstration of novel ways of thinking about such syntheses, and Albert Eschenmoser (Switzerland; b. 1925) for outstanding research on the synthesis, stereochemistry and reaction mechanisms for formation of natural products, especially Vitamin-B12.
  • 1987: Lord David C. Phillips (UK, 1924-1999) and David M. Blow (UK, 1931-2004) for their contributions to protein X-ray crystallography and to the elucidation of structures of enzymes and their mechanisms of action.
  • 1988: Joshua Jortner (Israel; b. 1933) and Raphael David Levine (Israel; b. 1938) for their incisive theoretical studies elucidating energy acquisition and disposal in molecular systems and mechanisms for dynamical selectivity and specificity.
  • 1989: Duilio Arigoni (Switzerland; b. 1928) and Sir Alan R. Battersby (United Kingdom; b. 1925) for their fundamental contributions to the elucidation of the mechanism of enzymic reactions and of the biosynthesis of natural products, in particular the pigments of life.
  • 1990: No award
  • 1991: Richard R. Ernst (Switzerland) for his revolutionary contributions to NMR spectroscopy, especially Fourier-transform and two-dimensional NMR and Alexander Pines (Rhodesia/United States; b. 1945) for his revolutionary contributions to NMR spectroscopy, especially multiple-quantum and high-spin NMR.
  • 1992: Sir John Pople (United Kingdom; 1925-2004) for his outstanding contributions to theoretical chemistry, particularly in developing effective and widely used modern quantum-chemical methods.
  • 1993: Ahmed Hassan Zewail (Egypt/United States; b. 1946) for pioneering the development of laser femtochemistry. Using lasers and molecular beams, femtochemistry has made it now possible to probe the evolution of chemical reactions as they actually happen in real time.
  • 1994/5: Richard A. Lerner (United States; b. 1938) and Peter Schultz (United States; b. 1956) for developing catalytic antibodies, thus permitting the catalysis of chemical reactions considered impossible to achieve by classical chemical procedures.
  • 1995/6: Gilbert Stork (United States; b. 1921) and Samuel J. Danishefsky (United States; b. 1936) for designing and developing novel chemical reactions which have opened new avenues to the synthesis of complex molecules, particularly polysaccharides and many other biologically and medicinally important compounds.
  • 1996/7: No award
  • 1998: Gerhard Ertl (Germany; b. 1936) and Gabor A. Somorjai (Hungary/United States; b. 1935) for their outstanding contributions to the field of the surface science in general, and for their elucidation of fundamental mechanisms of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at single crystal surfaces in particular.
  • 1999: Raymond U. Lemieux (Canada; 1920-2000), for his fundamental and seminal contributions to the study and synthesis of oligosaccharides and to the elucidation of their role in molecular recognition in biological systems.
  • 2000: Frank Albert Cotton (United States; 1930-2007) for opening up an entirely new phase of transition metal chemistry based on pairs and clusters of metal atoms directly linked by single or multiple bonds.
  • 2001: Henri B. Kagan (France; b. 1935), Ryōji Noyori (Japan; b. 1938) and K. Barry Sharpless (United States; b. 1941), for their pioneering, creative and crucial work in developing asymmetric catalysis for the synthesis of chiral molecules, greatly increasing mankind's ability to create new products of fundamental and practical importance.
  • 2002/3: No award
  • 2004: Harry B. Gray (United States; b. 1935) for pioneering work in bio-inorganic chemistry, unravelling novel principles of structure and long-range electron transfer in proteins.
  • 2005: Richard N. Zare (United States; b. 1939), for his ingenious applications of laser techniques, for identifying complex mechanisms in molecules, and their use in analytical chemistry.
  • 2006/7: Ada Yonath (Israel; b. 1938) and George Feher (United States; b. 1924), for ingenious structural discoveries of the ribosomal machinery of peptide-bond formation and the light-driven primary processes in photosynthesis.
  • 2008: William E. Moerner (united States; b. 1953) and Allen J. Bard (United States; b. 1933), for the ingenious creation of a new field of science, single molecule spectroscopy and electrochemistry, with impact at the nanoscopic regime, from the molecular and cellular domain to complex material systems.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: No award
  • 2011: Stuart A. Rice (United States; b. 1932), Ching W. Tang (United States; b. 1947 in Hong Kong) and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski (Poland/United States; b. 1950), for the deep creative contributions to the chemical sciences in the field of synthesis, properties and an understanding of organic materials.
  • 2012: A. Paul Alivisatos (United States; b. 1989), for his development of the colloidal inorganic nanocrystal as a building block of nanoscience and for making fundamental contributions to controlling the synthesis of these particles, to measuring and understanding their physical properties, and Charles M. Lieber (United States; b. 1959), for his seminal contributions to nanochemistry and particularly the synthesis of single-crystalline semiconductor nanowires, characterization of the fundamental physical properties of nanowires, and their application to electronics, photonics and nanomedicine.
  • 2013: Robert S. Langer (United States; b. 1948), for conceiving and implementing advances in polymer chemistry that provide both controlled drug-release systems and new biomaterials.
  • 2014: Chi-Huey Wong, (Taiwan/United States; b. 1948), for his numerous and original contributions to the development of innovative methods for the programmable and applied synthesis of complex oligosaccharides and glycol-proteins.
  • 2015: No award
  • 2016: Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou (Cyprus/United States; b.1946), for advancing the field of chemical synthesis to the extremes of molecular complexity, linking structure and function and expanding our dominion over the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine, and Stuart Schreiber (United States; b. 1956), for pioneering chemical insights into the logic of signal transduction and gene regulation that led to important, new therapeutics and for advancing chemical biology and medicine through the discovery of small-molecule probes.
  • 2017: Robert G. Bergman (United States) for his discovery of the activation responses of carbon-hydrogen bonds in hydrocarbons by soluble organometallic complexes.
  • 2018: Omar M. Yaghi (Jordan/ United States) for pioneering Reticular Chemistry via Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs) and Makoto Fujita (Japan) for conceiving metal-directed assembly principles leading to large highly porous complexes.
  • 2019: Stephen L. Buchwald (b. 1955) and John F. Hartwig (b. 1964) (United States) for pioneering the development of transition metal catalyzed procedures that are broadly applicable and allow carbon-heteroatom bonds of all sorts to be formed with previously unknown efficiency and precision.

Wolf Prize in Mathematics

  • 1978: Israel Gelfand (Russia; 1913-2009) for his work in functional analysis, group representation, and for his seminal contributions to many areas of mathematics and its applications, and Carl L. Siegel (Germany; 1896-1981) for his contributions to the theory of numbers, theory of several complex variables, and celestial mechanics.
  • 1979: Jean Leray (France) for pioneering work on the development and application of topological methods to the study of differential equations, and André Weil (France) for his inspired introduction of algebraic-geometric methods to the theory of numbers.
  • 1980: Henri Cartan (France) for pioneering work in algebraic topology, complex variables, homological algebra and inspired leadership of a generation of mathematicians, and Andrey Kolmogorov (Russia; 1903-1987), for deep and original discoveries in Fourier analysis, probability theory, ergodic theory and dynamical systems.
  • 1981: Lars Ahlfors (Finland) for seminal discoveries and the creation of powerful new methods in geometric function theory, and Oscar Zariski (United States) creator of the modern approach to algebraic geometry, by its fusion with commutative algebra.
  • 1982: Hassler Whitney (United States) for his fundamental work in algebraic topology, differential geometry and differential topology; and Mark Krein (Soviet Union) for his fundamental contributions to functional analysis and its applications.
  • 1983/4: Shiing-Shen Chern (United States) for outstanding contributions to global differential geometry, which have profoundly influenced all mathematics; and Paul Erdős (Hungary) for his numerous contributions to number theory, combinatorics, probability, set theory and mathematical analysis, and for personally stimulating mathematicians the world over.
  • 1984/5: Kunihiko Kodaira (Japan) for his outstanding contributions to the study of complex manifolds and algebraic varieties; and Hans Lewy (West Germany/United States) for initiating many, now classic and essential, developments in partial differential equations.
  • 1986: Samuel Eilenberg (United States; 1913-1998) for his fundamental work in algebraic topology and homological algebra; and Atle Selberg (Norway; 1917-2007) for his profound and original work on number theory and on discrete groups and automorphic forms.
  • 1987: Kiyoshi Itō (Japan) for his fundamental contributions to pure and applied probability theory, especially the creation of the stochastic differential and integral calculus; and Peter Lax (United States) for his outstanding contributions to many areas of analysis and applied mathematics.
  • 1988: Friedrich Hirzebruch (West Germany) for outstanding work combining topology, algebraic geometry and differential geometry, and algebraic number theory; and for his stimulation of mathematical cooperation and research; and Lars Hörmander (Sweden) for fundamental work in modern analysis, in particular, the application of pseudo-differential operators and Fourier integral operators to linear partial differential equations.
  • 1989: Alberto Calderón (Argentina) for his groundbreaking work on singular integral operators and their application to important problems in partial differential equations; and John Milnor (United States) for ingenious and highly original discoveries in geometry, which have opened important new vistas in topology from the algebraic, combinatorial, and differentiable viewpoint.
  • 1990: Ennio de Giorgi (Italy; 1928-1996) for his innovating ideas and fundamental achievements in partial differential equations and calculus of variations; and Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (Israel/United States) for his fundamental contributions in the fields of homogeneous complex domains, discrete groups, representation theory and automorphic forms.
  • 1991: No award
  • 1992: Lennart Carleson (Sweden; b. 1928) for his fundamental contributions to Fourier analysis, complex analysis, quasi-conformal mappings and dynamical systems, and John G. Thompson (United States; b. 1932) for his profound contributions to all aspects of finite group theory and connections with other branches of mathematics.
  • 1993: Mikhail Gromov (Russia/France; b. 1943) for his revolutionary contributions to global Riemannian and symplectic geometry, algebraic topology, geometric group theory and the theory of partial differential equations; and Jacques Tits (Belgium/France; b. 1930) for his pioneering and fundamental contributions to the theory of the structure of algebraic and other classes of groups and in particular for the theory of buildings.
  • 1994/5: Jürgen Moser (Germany/United States; 1928-1999) for his fundamental work on stability in Hamiltonian mechanics and his profound and influential contributions to nonlinear differential equations.
  • 1995/6: Robert Langlands (Canada; b. 1936) for his path-blazing work and extraordinary insight in the fields of number theory, automorphic forms and group representation; and Andrew Wiles (United Kingdom; b. 1953) for spectacular contributions to number theory and related fields, major advances on fundamental conjectures, and for settling Fermat's last theorem.
  • 1996/7: Joseph B. Keller (United States; b. 1923) for his profound and innovative contributions, in particular to electromagnetic, optical, and acoustic wave propagation and to fluid, solid, quantum and statistical mechanics; and Yakov G. Sinai (Russia/United States; b. 1935) for his fundamental contributions to mathematically rigorous methods in statistical mechanics and the ergodic theory of dynamical systems and their applications in physics.
  • 1998: No award
  • 1999: László Lovász (Hungary/United States; b. 1948) for his outstanding contributions to combinatorics, theoretical computer science and combinatorial optimization; and Elias M. Stein (United States; b. 1935 in Antwerp) for his contributions to classical and Euclidean Fourier analysis and for his exceptional impact on a new generation of analysts through his eloquent teaching and writing.
  • 2000: Raoul Bott (Hungary/United States; 1923-2005) for his deep discoveries in topology and differential geometry and their applications to Lie groups, differential operators and mathematical physics; and Jean-Pierre Serre (France; b. 1926) for his many fundamental contributions to topology, algebraic geometry, algebra, and number theory and for his inspirational lectures and writing.
  • 2001: Vladimir Arnold (Russia; 1937-2010) for his deep and influential work in a multitude of areas of mathematics, including dynamical systems, differential equations, and singularity theory; and Saharon Shelah (Israel; b. 1945) for his many fundamental contributions to mathematical logic and set theory, and their applications within other parts of mathematics.
  • 2002/3: Mikio Sato (Japan; b. 1928) for his creation of algebraic analysis, including hyperfunction theory and microfunction theory, holonomic quantum field theory, and a unified theory of soliton equations; and John Tate (United States; b. 1925) for his creation of fundamental concepts in algebraic number theory.
  • 2004: No award
  • 2005: Gregory Margulis (Russia; b. 1946) for his monumental contributions to algebra, in particular to the theory of lattices in semi-simple Lie groups, and striking applications of this to ergodic theory, representation theory, number theory, combinatorics, and measure theory; and Sergei Novikov (Russia; b. 1938) for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to algebraic and differential topology, and to mathematical physics, notably the introduction of algebraic-geometric methods.
  • 2006/7: Stephen Smale (United States; b. 1930) for his groundbreaking contributions that have played a fundamental role in shaping differential topology, dynamical systems, mathematical economics, and other subjects in mathematics; and Hillel Furstenberg (United States/Israel; b. 1935) for his profound contributions to ergodic theory, probability, topological dynamics, analysis on symmetric spaces and homogeneous flows.
  • 2008: Pierre Deligne (Belgium) for his work on mixed Hodge theory; the Weil conjectures; the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence; and for his contributions to arithmetic; and Phillip A. Griffiths (United States; b. 1938) for his work on variations of Hodge structures; the theory of periods of abelian integrals; and for his contributions to complex differential geometry; and David B. Mumford (United States; b. 1937) for his work on algebraic surfaces; on geometric invariant theory; and for laying the foundations of the modern algebraic theory of moduli of curves and theta functions.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: Shing-Tung Yau (United States) for his work in geometric analysis that has had a profound and dramatic impact on many areas of geometry and physics, and Dennis P. Sullivan (United States) for his innovative contributions to algebraic topology and conformal dynamics.
  • 2011: No award
  • 2012: Michael Aschbacher (United States; b. 1944) for his work on the theory of finite groups, and Luis Caffarelli (Argentina/United States, b. 1948) for his work on partial differential equations.
  • 2013: George D. Mostow (United States) for his fundamental and pioneering contribution to geometry and Lie group theory, and Michael Artin (United States, b. 1934) for his fundamental contributions to algebraic geometry. His mathematical accomplishments are astonishing for their depth and their scope.
  • 2014 Peter Sarnak (South Africa/United States, b. 1953) for his deep contributions in analysis, number theory, geometry, and combinatorics.
  • 2015: James G. Arthur (Canada, b. 1944) for his monumental work on the trace formula and his fundamental contributions to the theory of automorphic representations of reductive groups.
  • 2016: No award
  • 2017: Richard Schoen (United States, b. 1950) for his contributions to geometric analysis and the understanding of the interconnectedness of partial differential equations and differential geometry, and Charles Fefferman (United States, b.1949) for his contributions in a number of mathematical areas including complex multivariate analysis, partial differential equations and sub-elliptical problems.
  • 2018: Alexander Beilinson (Russia/United States, b. 1957) and Vladimir Drinfeld (Ukraine/United States, b. 1954) for their work that has made significant progress at the interface of geometry and mathematical physics.
  • 2019: Jean-Francois Le Gall (France, b. 1959) for his several deep and elegant contributions to the theory of stochastic processes, and Gregory Lawler (United States, b. 1955) for his comprehensive and pioneering research on erased loops and random walks.

Wolf Prize in Medicine

  • 1978: George D. Snell (United States; 1905-1996), for discovery of H-2 antigens, which codes for major transplantation antigens and the onset of the immune response, and Jean Dausset (France; 1916-2009) for discovering the HL-A system, the major histocompatibility complex in man and its primordial role in organ transplantation; and Jon J. van Rood (Netherlands; b. 1926) for his contribution to the understanding of the complexity of the HL-A system in man and its implications in transplantation and in disease.
  • 1979: Roger Wolcott Sperry, (United States; 1913-1994) for his studies on the functional differentiation of the right and left hemispheres of the brain; and Arvid Carlsson (Sweden; b. 1923), for his work which established the role of dopamine as a neurotransmitter; and Oleh Hornykiewicz (Austria; b. 1927 in Ukraine) for opening a new approach in the control of Parkinson's disease by L-Dopa.
  • 1980: César Milstein (Argentina/United Kingdom; 1927-2002), Leo Sachs (Israel; 1924-2013) and James L. Gowans (United Kingdom; b. 1924) for their contributions to knowledge of the function and dysfunction of the body cells through their studies on the immunological role of the lymphocytes, the development of specific antibodies and the elucidation of mechanisms governing the control and differentiation of normal and cancer cells.
  • 1981: Barbara McClintock (United States) for her imaginative and important contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure behaviour and function, and for her identification and description of transposable genetic (mobile) elements; and Stanley N. Cohen (United States; b. 1935) for his concepts underlying genetic engineering; for constructing a biologically functional hybrid plasmid, and for achieving actual expression of a foreign gene implanted in E. coli by the recombinant DNA method.
  • 1982: Jean-Pierre Changeux (France; b. 1936), for the isolation, purification and characterization of the acetylcholine receptor; and Solomon H. Snyder (United States, b. 1938) for the development of the ways to label neurotransmitter receptors which provide tools to describe their properties; and James W. Black (United Kingdom; 1924-2010) for developing agents which block beta adrenergic and histamine receptors.
  • 1983/4: No award
  • 1984/5: Donald F. Steiner (United States; 1930-2014) for his discoveries concerning the bio-synthesis and processing of insulin which have had profound implications for basic biology and clinical medicine.
  • 1986: Osamu Hayaishi (Japan; 1920-2015) for his discovery of the oxygenase enzymes and elucidation of their structure and biological importance.
  • 1987: Pedro Cuatrecasas (United States; b. 1936) and Meir Wilchek (Israel; b. 1935) for the invention and development of affinity chromatography and its applications to biomedical sciences.
  • 1988: Henri G. Hers (Belgium; 1923-2008) and Elizabeth F. Neufeld (United States; b. 1928) for the biochemical elucidation of lysosomal storage diseases and the resulting contributions to biology, pathology, prenatal diagnosis and therapeutics.
  • 1989: John Gurdon (United Kingdom; b. 1933), for his introduction of the xenopus oocyte into molecular biology and his demonstration that the nucleus of a differentiated cell and of the egg differ in expression but not in the content of genetic material; and Edward B. Lewis (United States; 1918-2004) for his demonstration and exploration of the genetic control of the development of body segments by homeotic genes.
  • 1990: Maclyn McCarty (United States; 1911-2005), for his part in the demonstration that the transforming factor in bacteria is due to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and the concomitant discovery that the genetic material is composed of DNA.
  • 1991: Seymour Benzer (United States; 1921-2007) for having generated a new field of molecular neurogenetics by his pioneering research on the dissection of the nervous system and behavior by gene mutations.
  • 1992: M. Judah Folkman (United States; 1933-2008) for his discoveries which originated the concept and developed the field of angiogenesis research.
  • 1993: No award
  • 1994/5: Michael J. Berridge (United Kingdom; b.1938) and Yasutomi Nishizuka (Japan; 1932-2004) for their discoveries concerning cellular transmembrane signalling involving phospholipids and calcium.
  • 1995/6 Stanley B. Prusiner (United States; b. 1942) for discovering prions, a new class of pathogens that cause important neurodegenerative disease by inducing changes in protein structure.
  • 1997: Mary Frances Lyon (United Kingdom; 1925-2014) for her hypothesis concerning the random inactivation of X-chromosomes in mammals.
  • 1998: Michael Sela (Israel; b. 1924 (Poland)) and Ruth Arnon (Israel) for their major discoveries in the field of immunology.
  • 1999: Eric R. Kandel (United States; b. 1929) for the elucidation of the organismic, cellular and molecular mechanisms whereby short-term memory is converted to a long-term form.
  • 2000: No award
  • 2001: Avram Hershko (Israel) and Alexander Varshavsky (Russia/United States; b. 1946) for the discovery of the ubiquitin system of intracellular protein degradation and the crucial functions of this system in cellular regulation.
  • 2002/3: Ralph L. Brinster (United States; b/ 1932) for the development of procedures to manipulate mouse ova and embryos, which has enabled transgenesis and its applications in mice; and Mario Capecchi (Italy/United States; 1937) and Oliver Smithies (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1925) for their contribution to the development of gene-targeting, enabling elucidation of gene function in mice.
  • 2004: Robert A. Weinberg (United States; b. 1942) for his discovery that cancer cells including human tumor cells, carry somatically mutated genes-oncogenes that operate to drive their malignant proliferation; and Roger Y. Tsien (United States; b. 1952) for his seminal contribution to the design and biological application of novel fluorescent and photolabile molecules to analyze and perturb cell signal transduction.
  • 2005: Alexander Levitzki (Israel) for pioneering signal transduction therapy and for developing tyrosine kinase inhibitors as effective agents against cancer and a range of other diseases; and Anthony R. Hunter (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1943) for the discovery of protein kinases that phosphorylate tyrosine residues in proteins, critical for the regulation of a wide variety of cellular events, including malignant transformation ; and Anthony J. Pawson (United Kingdom/Canada; 1952-2013) for his discovery of protein domains essential for mediating protein-protein interactions in cellular signaling pathways, and the insights this research has provided into cancer.
  • 2006/7 No award
  • 2008: Howard Cedar and Aharon Razin (Israel) for their fundamental contributions to our understanding of the role of DNA methylation in the control of gene expression.
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: Axel Ullrich, (Germany; b. 1943) for groundbreaking cancer research that has led to development of new drugs.
  • 2011: Shinya Yamanaka (Japan; b.1962) and Rudolf Jaenisch (Germany/United States; b. 1942) for the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from skin cells (SY) and demonstration that iPS cells can be used to cure genetic disease in a mammal, thus establishing their therapeutic potential (RJ).
  • 2012: Ronald M. Evans (United States; b. 1949) for his discovery of the gene super-family encoding nuclear receptors and elucidating the mechanism of action of this class of receptors.
  • 2013: No award
  • 2014: Nahum Sonenberg (Israel/Canada; b. 1946) for his discovery of the proteins that control the protein expression mechanism and their operation; and Gary Ruvkun (United States; b. 1951) and Victor Ambros (United States; b. 1953) for the discovery of the micro-RNA molecules that play a key role in controlling gene expression in natural processes and disease development.
  • 2015: John Kappler (United States; b. 1943), Philippa Marrack (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1945) and Jeffrey Ravetch (United States; b. 1951) for major contributions to the understanding of the key antigen-specific molecules, the T cell receptor for antigen and antibodies and how these molecules participate in immune recognition and effector function.
  • 2016: C. Ronald Kahn (United States; b. 1944), for pioneering studies defining insulin signaling and its alterations in disease; and Lewis C. Cantley (United States; b. 1949) for discovery of phosphoinositide-3 kinases and their roles in physiology and disease.
  • 2017: James P. Allison (United States) for a revolution in cancer treatment due to the discovery of the immune control barrier.
  • 2018: No award
  • 2019: Jeffrey M. Friedman (United States, b. 1954) for the discovery of Leptin and the entirely new endocrine system controlling body weight (and many other processes).

Wolf Prize in Physics

  • 1978: Chien-Shiung Wu (United States), for her explorations of the weak interaction, helping establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force.
  • 1979: George Eugene Uhlenbeck (Netherlands / United States; 1900-1988) for his discovery, jointly with the late S. A. Goudsmit, of the electron spin and Giuseppe Occhialini (Italy; 1927-1993) for his contributions to the discoveries of electron pair production and of the charged pion.
  • 1980: Michael E. Fisher (United Kingdom; b. 1931) and Leo P. Kadanoff (1937-2015) and Kenneth G. Wilson (1936-2013) (United States) for pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter.
  • 1981: Freeman J. Dyson (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1923), and Gerard 't Hooft (Netherlands; b. 1946), and Victor F. Weisskopf (Austria/United States; 1908-2002) for their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields.
  • 1982: Leon M. Lederman (b. 1922) and Martin Lewis Perl (United States; 1927-2014) for their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of quarks and leptons.
  • 1983/4: Erwin L. Hahn (United States; b. 1921) for his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency; and Peter B. Hirsch (United Kingdom; b. 1925) for his development of the utilization of the transmission electron microscope as a universal instrument to study the structure of crystalline matter; and Theodore H. Maiman (United States; 1927-2007) for his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser.
  • 1985: Conyers Herring (United States; 1914-2009) and Philippe Nozieres (France; b. 1932) for their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals.
  • 1986: Mitchell J. Feigenbaum (United States; b. 1944) for his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos; and Albert J. Libchaber (France/United States; b. 1934) for his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition to turbulence and chaos in dynamic systems.
  • 1987: Herbert Friedman (United States; 1916-2000) for pioneering investigations in solar X-rays. and Bruno B. Rossi (Italy/United states; 1905-1993) and Riccardo Giacconi (Italy/United States; b. 1931) for the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes.
  • 1988: Roger Penrose and Stephen W. Hawking (United Kingdom) for their brilliant development of the theory of general relativity, in which they have shown the necessity for cosmological singularities and have elucidated the physics of black holes. In this work they have greatly enlarged our understanding of the origin and possible fate of the Universe.
  • 1989: No award
  • 1990: Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (France) and David J. Thouless (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1934) for a wide variety of pioneering contributions to our understanding of the organization of complex condensed matter systems, de Gennes especially for his work on macromolecular matter and liquid crystals and Thouless for his on disordered and low-dimensional systems.
  • 1991: Maurice Goldhaber (United States) and Valentine L. Telegdi (Switzerland/United States; 1922-2006) for their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons.
  • 1992: Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. ( United States; b. 1941) for his discovery of an orbiting radio pulsar and its exploitation to verify the general theory of relativity to high precision.
  • 1993: Benoît Mandelbrot (France/United States 1924-2010) by recognizing the widespread occurrence of fractals and developing mathematical tools for describing them, he has changed our view of nature.
  • 1994/95: Vitaly L. Ginzburg (Russia; 1916-2009) for his contributions to the theory of superconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics: and Yoichiro Nambu (Japan/United States; 1921-2015) for his contribution to elementary particle theory, including recognition of the role played by spontaneous symmetry breaking in analogy with superconductivity theory, and the discovery of the color symmetry of the strong interactions.
  • 1995/96: No award
  • 1996/97: John Archibald Wheeler (United States; 1911-2008) for his seminal contributions to black holes physics, to quantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering and nuclear fission.
  • 1998: Yakir Aharonov (Israel; b. 1932) and Michael V. Berry (United Kingdom; b. 1941) for the discovery of quantum topological and geometrical phases. specifically the Aharonov–Bohm effect, the Berry phase, and their incorporation into many fields of physics.
  • 1999: Dan Shechtman (Israel; b. 1941) for the experimental discovery of quasi-crystals, non-periodic solids having long-range order, which inspired the exploration of a new fundamental state of matter.
  • 2000: Raymond Davis, Jr. (United States; 1914-2006) and Masatoshi Koshiba (Japan; b. 1926) for their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy.
  • 2001: No award
  • 2002/03: Bertrand I. Halperin (United States; b. 1941) and Anthony J. Leggett (United Kingdom/United States; b. 1936) for key insights into the broad range of condensed matter physics: Leggett on superfluidity of the light helium isotope and macroscopic quantum phenomena; and Halperin on two- dimensional melting, disordered systems and strongly interacting electrons.
  • 2004: Robert Brout (United stated/Belgium; 1928-2011) and François Englert (Belgium; b. 1932) and Peter W. Higgs (United Kingdom; b. 1929) for pioneering work that has led to the insight of mass generation whenever a local gauge symmetry is realized asymmetrically in the world of sub-atomic particles.
  • 2005: Daniel Kleppner (United States; b. 1932) for groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on the hydrogen maser, Rydberg atoms and Bose–Einstein condensation.
  • 2006/07: Albert Fert (France; b. 1938) and Peter Grünberg (Germany; b. 1939) for their independent discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon (GMR), thereby launching a new field of research and applications known as spintronics, which utilizes the spin of the electron to store and transport information.
  • 2008: No award
  • 2009: No award
  • 2010: John F. Clauser (United States; b. 1942) and Alain Aspect (France; b. 1947) and Anton Zeilinger (Austria; b. 1945) for their fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell's inequalities, or extensions thereof, using entangled quantum states.
  • 2011: [ Maximilian Haider] (Austria; ) and [ Harald Rose] (Germany; b. ) and [ Knut Urban] (Germany; b. ) for their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science.
  • 2012: Jacob D. Bekenstein יעקב בקנשטיין (Israel; 1947-2015) for his work on black holes.
  • 2013: [ Peter Zoller] (Austria; b. 1952), [ Ignacio Cirac] (Spain; b. 1965) for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
  • '2014: No award
  • 2015: [ James D. Bjorken] (United States; b. 1934) for predicting scaling in deep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon’s pointlike constituents. He made a crucial contribution for elucidating the nature of the strong force; and [ Robert P. Kirshner] (United States; b. 1949) for creating the group, environment and directions that allowed his graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to uncover the acceleration in the expansion of the universe.
  • 2016: Yoseph Imry (Israel) for his work in mesoscopic physics – a branch of physics that studies objects that are smaller than macroscopic (visible to the naked eye) objects but bigger than atoms.
  • 2017: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Switzerland) for the discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting around a star similar to the sun.
  • 2018: Charles H. Bennett (United States) and Gilles Brassard (Canada) for their collaborative work in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science.
  • 2019: No award
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