Honours and Awards Questions

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur will confer a doctorate on former sprint queen PT Usha, who missed a medal by a whisker at the 1984, Los Angeles Olympics. The degree, Doctor of Science (honoris causa – a degree awarded as a mark of esteem) will be conferred on June 16 to mark the 50th convocation of the prestigious institute of the country. This is her second doctorate – in 2002, Kannur University had conferred D.Lit on her.

Rainer Weiss, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, both of the California Institute of Technology, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but had never been directly seen.