UF professor Pierre Ramond almost didn’t return the $10,000 call.
The distinguished UF physics professor thought the call that said “Please call me back, you will like what you hear from me,” was from a telemarketer.
When Ramond dialed, H. Frederick Dylla, the CEO of the American Institute of Physics, congratulated him on winning the 2015 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.
“I said, ‘Please excuse me, I have to sit down a moment,’” Ramond said. “I wasn’t quite ready to hear that.”
Ramond is one of two professors in UF’s physics department to receive prestigious awards in October.
The other, Art Hebard received his congratulatory email while at a conference in Poland. He is one of four recipients of the 2015 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize.
“I was thrilled to hear this. Just sitting there in my hotel lobby, I didn’t expect it,” he said.
Hebard’s award consists of $20,000 split with the three other collaborators who share the prize. Hebard received the award for his outstanding experimental contributions to condensed matter physics. It is the result of experiments he began in the mid-1980s involving solid thin-films and altering the superconductivity of the films with factors other than temperature.
Ramond, the director of UF’s Institute for Fundamental Theory, said his prize is special because of the recognition from his peers.
It honors the work he has done in generalizing string theory to superstrings, which can explain all matter that makes up the universe.
Within the next year, Ramond’s theories will be tested at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
In April, Ramond will attend a conference in Baltimore, Maryland, to accept his prize.
“That is quite exciting,” he said. “Nobody ever gave me $10K before.”
[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 11/18/2014]
