Israeli neuroscientist Haim Sompolinsky shares the 2026 Dirac Medal
ICTP honours the Hebrew University and Harvard theorist, with three colleagues, for carrying the physics of disordered systems into brain science and artificial intelligence.
On 8 August 2026, the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, announced that its 2026 Dirac Medal would go to four theorists: Bernard Derrida of the Collège de France, Deepak Dhar of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in India, Marc Mézard of Bocconi University, and Haim Sompolinsky, emeritus professor of neuroscience and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and professor in residence at Harvard University. The medal, created in 1985 in memory of Paul Dirac, is among the most prestigious honours in theoretical physics.
The committee cited the four for pioneering work in equilibrium statistical mechanics and for extending it to non-equilibrium systems, optimisation problems, theoretical neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Statistical mechanics describes how large collections of interacting parts, such as atoms in a magnet, give rise to collective behaviour; these researchers showed that the same mathematics can explain systems as different as random materials, hard computational problems and networks of neurons.
Sompolinsky, who earned his doctorate at Bar-Ilan University and joined the Hebrew University in 1986, was one of the founders of theoretical neuroscience as a quantitative field. With Daniel Amit and Hanoch Gutfreund he solved the Hopfield model of associative memory in the 1980s, a result ICTP describes as one of the first rigorous bridges between statistical physics and how the brain works. He went on to develop dynamic mean-field theory for large neural networks, to explain the irregular firing seen in the cortex, and more recently to study the geometry of how brains and deep-learning systems represent objects. He has also directed Harvard's Swartz Program in Theoretical Neuroscience.
The Hebrew University publicly congratulated Sompolinsky on the award on 11 August. The Dirac Medal adds to the 2024 Brain Prize, the world's largest neuroscience award, which he shared for computational and theoretical neuroscience.
“Haim has fundamentally changed the way we understand intelligence, both natural and artificial.”
The mathematical tools Sompolinsky helped bring from physics into neuroscience now underpin how researchers model memory, perception and learning, and they have fed directly into the theory of modern artificial neural networks.
Sources
- ICTP Announces 2026 Dirac Medal RecipientsICTP, August 8, 2026
- The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Congratulates Prof. Haim Sompolinsky on Receiving the 2026 Dirac MedalHebrew University of Jerusalem, August 11, 2026
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