Sir Paul McCartney awarded Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize

Sir Paul McCartney has been told he is to receive a prestigious prize awarded by the Israeli president.

The singer-songwriter will share the Wolf Prize for Music with conductor and musician Adam Fischer in a ceremony held at Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, at the end of May.

His is one of five Wolf Foundation awards, totalling $500,000 in prize money, divided this year between nine winners from the US, UK, Canada, Japan and Hungary, as well as Professor Omar Yaghi, a native of Amman in neighbouring Jordan.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said: “Together with the Prize Committee, I and many Israelis share the eternal love of the works of Sir Paul McCartney and the Beatles.”

Past Wolf Prize winner Prof. Dan Shechtman announced McCartney and others as winners on the same day that Rivlin announced the winner of the Israel Prize 2018 was author David Grossman, “one of the greatest writers we have ever known among the Israeli people”.

The Wolf Prize for Agriculture will be granted to Illinois-based Prof. Gene Robinson for leading the genomics revolution in organismal and population biology of the honey bee.

The Wolf Prize for Chemistry will be shared by California-based Prof. Omar Yaghi for pioneering reticular chemistry via metal-organic frameworks and covalent organic framework; and Tokyo-based Prof. Makoto Fujita for conceiving metal-directed assembly principles leading to large highly porous complexes.

The Wolf Prize for Physics will be shared by New York-based Prof. Charles H. Bennett and Prof. Gilles Brassard from Montréal for founding and advancing the fields of Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Teleportation.

The Wolf Prize for Mathematics will be shared by two laureates: Prof. Alexander Beilinson and Prof. Vladimir Drinfeld, both from the University of Chicago, for their ground-breaking work in algebraic geometry, representation theory, and mathematical physics.

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