Professor Samson Shatashvili appointed to Balzan General Prize Committee

Posted on: 26 May 2026

The Balzan Prize is an annual international award recognising outstanding achievements in literature, the moral sciences, the arts, the physical and mathematical sciences, medicine, and the promotion of peace. Managed by the International Balzan Foundation, it is one of the most prestigious and highly compensated academic awards globally.

Underlining the importance of the award, Prof. Katrin Wendland, Head of Trinity’s School of Mathematics, said: “I am very happy to congratulate my colleague, Samson, on this huge honour. Among the Balzan Prize’s recipients since the first award was made in 1961 there are only around a dozen mathematicians and theoretical physicists, all of whom are among the most creative and influential scientists in their field. This shows just how prestigious these awards are and what a great achievement it is to be appointed to be a member of the Balzan General Prize Committee. It is terrific to see Samson receive this well-deserved recognition.”

In 2024 Prof. Shatashvili was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, for outstanding publications in the field, in which he has made several significant contributions over the past four decades. The awardee list for this reads as a “who’s who” of the most impactful theoretical and mathematical physicists of the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Specifically referenced in that award were his use of various techniques in studying symmetry in quantum field theory, in particular, for work with L. Faddeev on anomalies, with C. Vafa on exceptional holonomy compactifications of superstrings, and for the co-discovery of Bethe/gauge correspondence between supersymmetric vacua and quantum integrability.

Interestingly, all these topics, as well as many others in Samson’s research, involve ideas and methods largely developed in Ireland in the 19^th century, at Trinity, by famous scientists William Rowan Hamilton and James MacCullagh. These are also the subjects in the mathematical foundations of Quantum Field Theory.

Much of the work Samson has performed at Trinity – with collaborators – is about the deep connection between supersymmetric quantum field theories and quantum integrable systems.

That knowledge turned out to be a powerful tool, which is now used in the study of quantum field theory, quantum many body systems, black holes, string theory, high energy and condensed matter physics, enumerative geometry, algebraic geometry, and in many other areas of theoretical physics and mathematics.

Ultimately, as Prof. Wendland explains, those contributions exemplify the “huge impact” that Samson’s work has had throughout his career. They document the scope of his work and knowledge, particularly in the fields of mathematics and physics, but the ripples of that research extend far beyond those disciplines.

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