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Newswise–The University of California San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University will co-host the 24th annual Kyoto Prize Symposium on March 12-13 in San Diego.
The Kyoto Prize is Japan’s highest private award for global visionaries who have made scientific and cultural advancements that benefit humankind. The esteemed 2024 Kyoto Prize laureates are John Pendry for Advanced Technology, Paul F. Hoffman for Basic Sciences, and William Forsythe for Arts and Philosophy.
The symposium will feature talks by each laureate as part of public presentations at UC San Diego. The event is free and open to the public.
A fundraising gala to support the Kyoto Prize Symposium scholarships and youth outreach program will also be held on March 12 at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center. Visit here to purchase tickets for the black-tie optional event.
The late Dr. Kazuo Inamori established the nonprofit Inamori Foundation in 1984 based on his life philosophy and founded the Kyoto Prize as its primary activity. Since the inception of San Diego’s Kyoto Prize Symposium in 2002, local events have generated more than $5 million in educational funding and college scholarships to the San Diego/Baja region. The Kyoto Symposium Organization is a San Diego-based nonprofit established to support the Kyoto Prize Symposium and Kyoto Prize Symposium Scholarship programs.
Inamori, who founded Kyocera Corporation in 1959, established San Diego-based Kyocera International, Inc., just 10 years later as his first subsidiary company outside of Japan. Today, the Kyocera Group includes nearly 300 companies and more than 79,000 employees worldwide.
UC San Diego and PLNU are proud to co-host the Kyoto Prize Symposium with the following presentations, featuring the influential contributions by the Kyoto Prize laureates in their respective fields. All presentations will be held in UC San Diego’s Price Center Ballroom – East.
Paul Hoffman – Kyoto Prize Laureate in Basic Sciences
Wednesday, March 12, 10-11:30 a.m.
Paul Hoffman, an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, has conducted groundbreaking research in the “Snowball Earth” (global freezing) hypothesis and plate tectonics occurring in the first half of the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. After earning his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University, Hoffman served the Geological Survey of his native Canada for 24 years followed by teaching at Harvard University and conducting related research in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has geologically demonstrated the occurrence of the postulated global freeze, so-called “Snowball Earth”, which drove the rapid diversification of animals in the Cambrian period approximately 520 million years ago.
“Paul Hoffman has carried out decades of extensive and thorough geological fieldwork to create a clear and convincing case that there were ‘Snowball Earth’ episodes hundreds of millions of years ago,” said Ian Eisenman, professor of Climate, Atmospheric Sciences and Physical Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “During these episodes, the climate was almost unimaginably colder than today, with ice cover extending to the tropics.”
John Pendry – Kyoto Prize Laureate in Advanced Technology
Wednesday, March 12, 1-2:30 p.m.
John Pendry serves as a professor of Theoretical Solid State Physics at Imperial College London. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, Pendry’s initial research concerned a low-energy electron diffraction theory for examining and measuring the surface of materials for practical purposes. He theoretically demonstrated that materials with electromagnetic properties not found in nature, such as negative-refractive-index materials (metamaterials), can be created by designing microstructures smaller than the wavelength of the target electromagnetic waves. This groundwork helped create innovative materials such as “superlenses” with subwavelength resolution and “invisibility cloaks.”
“It is remarkable the impact that Sir John Pendry’s insight and ideas have had on the scientific and engineering fields,” said Michael Frazier, associate professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “In the last two decades, the metamaterial concept has expanded beyond electromagnetics to acoustics, classical and quantum mechanics, biology, and chemistry, and is finding application in medicine, robotics, transportation and infrastructure.”
William Forsythe – Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy
Thursday, March 13, 10-11:30 a.m.
William Forsythe is a choreographer whose work has extended ballet to a dynamic contemporary art form. Forsythe danced with New York’s Joffrey Ballet and later with the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany, where he was appointed resident choreographer in 1976. Over the next seven years, he created new works for the Stuttgart ensemble and other ballet companies worldwide. In 1984, he began a 20-year tenure as director of Ballet Frankfurt. After the closure of the Ballet Frankfurt in 2004, Forsythe established a new, more independent ensemble, The Forsythe Company, which he directed from 2005 to 2015. Between 2015 and 2021 he served on the University of Southern California’s faculty, where he helped establish the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. Forsythe has broken the boundaries of conventional ballet style, challenging traditional artistic frameworks and developing improvisation techniques. His projects include installations and films presented in numerous museums, as well as dance documentation and education.
“A pioneer of contemporary ballet, William Forsythe burst onto the dance scene in the early 1980s disrupting all that had come before him. Building upon the shoulders of George Balanchine, who changed the genre in the early 20th century from a story/spectacle-focused art form to a celebration of pure, minimalist dance, Forsythe introduced improvisation, chance, and an iconoclastic wit to ballet,” said Lisa Portes, chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. “His deep curiosity about the possibilities of the form has resulted not only in dozens of choreographed pieces featured in New York, London, Frankfurt, Paris, and across the globe but in numerous experimental installations both in actual space and online.”
The Kyoto Prize is presented each year by Japan’s nonprofit Inamori Foundation to individuals and groups worldwide who have demonstrated outstanding contributions to the betterment of society, in “Advanced Technology,” “Basic Sciences,” and “Arts and Philosophy.” The prize consists of a diploma, a Kyoto Prize medal, and prize money of 100 million yen (approximately $650,000) per category, making it Japan’s highest private award for global achievement.
