Slovenia's top science awards for lifetime achievement this year are going to physicist Danilo Zavrtanik and mathematician Joso Vukman, and mechanical engineering researcher Jože Vižintin is being honoured for his contribution to the country's economic development.

Zavrtanik, professor of physics at the University of Nova Gorica and a researcher and former director of the Jožef Stefan Institute, has been a driving force behind the efforts to promote equal participation of Slovenian researchers in the international arena.

Owing to his efforts and the efforts of his colleagues, Slovenia became an associate member of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

In 1995 he founded the international School of Environmental Sciences in Nova Gorica, which he led for many years and managed to develop into a successful university, the awards panel said in declaring the winners of the Zois Prizes on 13 October.

Vukman, a distinguished professor of the University of Maribor, has influenced the development of the theory of functional identities, one of the most important theories of the last thirty years in the ring theory.

He is seen as the founder of theoretical mathematics at the university. Like Zavrtanik, he is being honoured with the Zois Prize for lifetime achievement.

Vižintin, the winner of the Puh Prize for lifetime achievement, was the first person in the world to measure the temperature generated in a fretting contact and prove the change in the structure of a material that leads to its loss of strength and loadbearing capacity.

He has also received the Zois Prize for excellence in mechanical engineering for his achievement, which was particularly important for the assessment of the lifespan of bearings in aircraft engines.

The top national science awards will be handed out at a ceremony in Ljubljana's Cankarjev Dom on 28 November. The winners are usually declared at the ceremony itself but this year they were declared early at the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation.

The Zois Prizes are named after Baron Žiga Zois (1747-1819), one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment Era in Slovenian lands of the Habsburg monarchy. They have been presented annually since 1998.

The Puh Prizes, first given out in 2018, honour researchers whose work has contributed to Slovenia's economic or social development. They are named after the inventor Janez Puh (1862-1914).