Archibald Ollé Prize

The Archibald Ollé Prize of $500 is is awarded from time to time at the discretion of Council to the author who has submitted and had accepted the best single-author paper to the Society’s Journal. The prize was established under the terms of a bequest of Mrs A. D. Ollé.

The Prize is awarded by Council on the recommendation of the Journal Editor, assisted by a sub-committee of the Editorial Board. Publication in the Journal will be taken as a nomination for the Prize.

The sole criterion for this award is how well does the paper succeed in promoting the image and purposes of the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales.

Archibald Ollé Prize 2020

The 2020 Archibald Ollé Prize has been awarded to the late Dr Ann Moyal AM FRSN for the paper “P.A.M. Dirac and the Maverick Mathematician,” Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 150, part 2, 2017, pp. 188–194. The paper’s abstract: “Historian of science Ann Moyal recounts the story of a singular correspondence between the great British physicist, P. A. M. Dirac, at Cambridge, and J. E. Moyal, then a scientist from outside academia working at the de Havilland Aircraft Company in Britain (later an academic in Australia), on the question of a statistical basis for quantum mechanics. A David and Goliath saga, it marks a paradigmatic study in the history of quantum physics.“

List of Past Recipients of the Archibald Ollé Prize