Itamar Procaccia

Itamar Procaccia was born in 1949 in Tel Aviv

Itamar Procaccia was born on September 29, 1949, in Tel Aviv. His father was the jurist Gualtiero Procaccia, and his brother is the jurist Uriel Procaccia. He finished high school at Tichon Hadash.

After army service, he studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a bachelor's degree with honors in 1973. He then did a doctorate in theoretical chemistry under Raphael David Levine, completed in 1976. He went on to postdoctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he moved into statistical physics.

In 1979 he joined the Department of Chemical Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and became a full professor in 1985. He headed the department and served as dean of the Faculty of Chemistry from 1989 to 2000. In 1983, with Peter Grassberger, he introduced the correlation dimension, a measure of fractal dimension.

He has held guest posts at institutions including Rockefeller University and the University of Chicago. He received the Israel Prize for physics in 2009, the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize in 2017 and the Leo P. Kadanoff Prize in 2023.