Accolades

Two Graduate School of Business professors have received the Ernest R. Wish Accounting Research Award. Daniel Bens, Associate Professor of Accounting, and Franco Wong, Assistant Professor of Accounting, were selected as this year’s recipients.

A GSB junior faculty member (or members) receives the award for the best research paper written in the field of accounting. Ernest Wish (M.B.A.,’71), chairman of Wish Enterprises and former managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers, established the award and made the gift to the GSB with his former firm.

Bens and Wong were honored for their work on the paper, “Employee stock options, EPS dilution and stock repurchases.”

Yoichiro Nambu, the Harry Pratt Judson Professor Emeritus in Physics, received the annual Bogoliubov Prize from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research of Dubna, Russia, this summer. Nambu was honored with the award for his fundamental contribution to the theory of colored quarks at the 21st International Symposium on Lepton and Photon Interactions at High Energies at Fermilab.

Nambu’s theory explains how the strong nuclear force governs the behavior of the quarks that make up protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei.

His contribution to quark theory stemmed from the early 1960s. “Many new discoveries were being made one after another in those days,” Nambu said.

Particle physicists had catalogued a variety of particles and found regularities. The quark model announced in 1963 stated that a proton was made up of three quarks.

“But the quarks had some strange properties that people never expected in the usual physical world,” Nambu said. In order to resolve the problem, Nambu postulated in 1965 that the three quarks also come in three varieties, now called colors, which removed the unnatural properties of the quark model. A.N. Tavkhelidze of the Republic of Georgia independently proposed the same idea that same year and shared the prize.

Nambu also is among the physicists whose work is highlighted in a new book, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics, by Martinus Veltman. Veltman noted that Nambu had significantly influenced the development of quantum chromodynamics, a theory that describes certain interactions between quarks and between protons and neutrons.

Veltman wrote that Nambu also helped introduce the concept of gluons, which are particles that carry the nuclear force.