The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to

Yoichiro Nambu
Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA

 “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics".

Professor Nambu was one of the recipients of the Dirac Medal of the ICTP in 1986. He served on the Dirac Medal Selection Committee from 1993 to 2004 and visited ICTP again as a conference lecturer at the Trieste Conference on Quarks and Leptons in 1996. He also contributed a chapter in the book One Hundred Reasons to Be a Scientist.

Professor Nambu shares the Nobel prize with Makoto Kobayashi from the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa from the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. Kobayashi and Maskawa are being honoured "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

For further information, please see http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2008/.