1993 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy

The 1993 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy is awarded to John F. Hawley for advancements in the field of computational astrophysics, and for significant discoveries that have been made with the numerical tools that he developed. A world leader in this emerging discipline, Hawley exhibits a remarkable balance of physical intuition with technical virtuosity and is a creative thinker both in analytical and in numerical science.

Recognizing the great importance of magnetic fields in systems of interest, Hawley invented a powerful new approach to magnetohydrodynamic calculations. Long avoided in the astrophysical community as prohibitively complex, numerical MHD has matured under Hawley's leadership into a powerful computational tool. With this tool, in collaboration with S. Balbus, Hawley discovered the almost universal nature of a powerful MHD instability, which may be the underlying physical cause of turbulent viscosity in accretion disks.

Hawley has also pioneered the application of supercomputers to other aspects of the gasdynam-ical behavior of accretion disks, in scenarios ranging from fully general relativistic flows onto black holes to the formation of planetary progenitors around ordinary stars.

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