The international Dobrushin Prize

Yakov Grigor'evich Sinai was honored with the International Dobrushin Prize for 2009 on July 16, 2009 for making significant contribution in the fields of physics and mathematics. The prize was presented to him at a conference, held to celebrate the 80th birth anniversary of Roland L'vovich Dobrushin. He was associated with the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Mathematics Department of Princeton University. His PhD dissertation was devoted to the description of all limiting distributions for two-state Markov chains that revealed his probabilistic intuition. He also focused on information theory, selecting it as the subject for his doctoral dissertation. He constructed nontranslationally invariant Gibbs fields that were referred to as Dobrushin phases in the mathematical and physical literature.