I am very happy to report here (after having done the same on my Greek blog first, for a change) that the "Max Planck" medal for 2011 has been assigned to Giorgio Parisi, a distinguished Italian theoretical physicist. I first got the welcome news from Facebook, thanks to my e-friendship with Parisi.

The Max Planck prize is assigned yearly by the German Society of Physics to physicists who distinguish themselves for their research in theoretical physics. The list of recipients of the prize is full of quite illustrious names: suffices to cite here Einstein (1929), Dirac (1952), Fermi (1954), Pauli (1958), Nambu (1985).

Giorgio Parisi is a renowned Italian particle physicist. Born in Rome in 1948, he studied with Nicola Cabibbo, under whose supervision he graduated with a thesis on the Higgs boson. After his degree he worked on several aspects of modern physics. In theoretical particle physics his name is mostly associated to the famous DGLAP equations (where in fact the "P" is from his last name), the equation that determine the evolution with energy transfer of the parton density functions inside hadrons.

Parisi is a professor of physics in Rome since 1981 (first at the Tor Vergata University, and then since 1992 at the Sapienza University). You can find more information on Parisi and his work in his web site.