The Australian Academy of Science was founded in 1954 by a group of distinguished Australians, including Australian Fellows of the Royal Society of London. The first president was Sir Mark Oliphant. The Academy is modelled after the Royal Society and operates under a Royal Charter; as such it is an independent body, but has government endorsement. The Academy Secretariat is in Canberra, at the Shine Dome.
The objectives of the Academy are to promote science through a range of activities. It has defined four major program areas:
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- recognition of outstanding contributions to science
- education and public awareness
- science policy
- international relations
Read more about Australian Academy Of Science: Origins, Fellows, Presidents, Awards, The Shine Dome, Other Learned Academies
Famous quotes containing the words australian, academy and/or science:
“The Australian mind, I can state with authority, is easily boggled.”
—Charles Osborne (b. 1927)
“...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”
—Jacques Attali (b. 1943)