2 U.S. Scientists Named Wolf Foundation Prize Winners for 1982

Two American scientists are to be awarded the prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize for physics for 1982, the Foundation announced on Friday.

They are Prof. Leon Lederman, of the Fermi Laboratory of Chicago, and Prof. Martin Perl of Standard University, California. They will be awarded the $100,000 prize by President Yitzhak Navon at a ceremony in the Knesset in May for their independent experimental discoveries of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of the tiniest building forms of matter inside the atom — quarks and leptons.

The Wolf Foundation prizes are regarded as second only in size and importance to the Nobel Prizes and at least four of the 42 winners since the Foundation’s establishment in 1978 have later won Nobel Prizes.

The Foundation award consists of $100,000 given for internationally recognized achievements in each of six categories — physics (the first so far announced this year), agriculture, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, and music.

The Foundation was established by the late Dr. Ricardo Wolf, who was born in Germany but emigrated to Cuba before World War I. He became Cuban Ambassador to Israel in 1961 and remained in Israel until his death last year at the age of 93. He was allowed by Cuban President Fidel Castro, a personal friend since his underground days, to remain in Israel after Cuba broke off diplomatic relations with Israel.

Wolf became a multimillionaire as a result of his development of a process which is used in steel mills throughout the world for recovering iron from the residue of the smelting process.

The Foundation’s annual budget of $1 million derives from an initial endowment of $10 million donated by the Wolf family in accordance with his will. In addition to the international awards, the foundation also awards several hundred scholarships, stipends and research grants to Israeli students.