One highlight of the meeting was the announcement by Prof Remo Ruffini that Roy Kerr would receive the Marcel Grossmann Award at the 11th Marcel Grossman Meeting in St Petersburg in 2006. Although the official presentation will take place in St Petersburg, Prof Ruffini could not resist a piece of theatre in presenting Roy with his TEST sculpture to keep safe here in Christchurch, as seen in the series of photos below.
The Grossmann Award recognises outstanding achievements in the fields of general relativity, gravitation and relativistic theories. Past recipients of the Grossmann Award include Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Francis Everett, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Tulio Regge, Abdus Salam and John Wheeler, among others. Fittingly enough, instead of a medal recipients of the prize receive the TEST sculpture - which is a mathematical representation of the paths of particles in the Kerr geometry - cast in silver.
Full details of the Grossmann award are online at
Remo Ruffini with TEST sculpture. (David Robinson is in foreground left.)
Remo Ruffini and Roy Kerr