2002 Nobel Prize Announcements <Prev Next>

The 2002 Peace, Literature, Economics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Physics Nobel Prizes and Ig-Nobel Prizes have been announced!

The time of the announcement is given in Stockholm time; subtract 6 hours to get the US Eastern Standard Time). If you use a JavaScript-enabled browser, move your mouse over the prize category and the status bar will display how soon the prize in this category will be announced.

Date: Friday, October 11, 2002 (11:00 a.m.) Prize: PEACE Awarding institution: The Norwegian Nobel Institute And the winner is... Jimmy Carter, Jr. "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development" Date: Thursday, October 10, 2002 (1:00 p.m. at the earliest) Prize: LITERATURE Awarding institution: The Swedish Academy And the winner is... Imre Kertesz "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history" Date: Wednesday, October 9, 2002 (15:30 p.m. at the earliest) Prize: ECONOMICS Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the winners are... Daniel Kahneman "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty" and Vernon L. Smith "for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms" Date: Wednesday, October 9, 2002 (11:45 a.m. at the earliest) Prize: CHEMISTRY Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the winners are... "for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules" John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules" and Kurt Wüthrich "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution" Date: Tuesday, October 8, 2002 (11:45 a.m. at the earliest) Prize: PHYSICS Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the winners are... Raymond Davis Jr, and Masatoshi Koshiba "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos" and Riccardo Giacconi "for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources". Date: Monday, October 7, 2002 (11:30 a.m. at the earliest) Prize: PHYSIOLOGY or MEDICINE Awarding institution: The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute And the winners are... Sydney Brenner, H. Robert Horvitz, John E. Sulston "for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" Date: Thursday, October 3, 2002 at 7:30 pm EDT Prize: IG NOBEL PRIZES Awarding institution: The Annals of Improbable Research And the winners are: MEDICINE Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture." PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426. PHYSICS Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. REFERENCE: "Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth," Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26. INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much. BIOLOGY Norma E. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain." REFERENCE: "Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches (Struthio camelus) Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain," Norma E. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, P. Bowers, D.C. Deeming, British Poultry Science, vol. 39, no. 4, September 1998, pp. 477-481. CHEMISTRY Theo Gray of Wolfram Research, in Champaign, Illinois, for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table. MATHEMATICS K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants." REFERENCE: "Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus)," K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, Veterinary Research Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 5-17. LITERATURE Vicki L. Silvers of the University of Nevada-Reno and David S. Kreiner of Missouri State University, for their colorful report "The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension." PUBLISHED IN: Reading Research and Instruction, vol. 36, no. 3, 1997, pp. 217-23. ECONOMICS The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut & Hausbie [Belgium], Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International [Pakistan], Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom [Russia], Global Crossing, HIH Insurance [Australia], Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications [UK], McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world. [NOTE: all companies are US-based unless otherwise noted.] PEACE Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device. HYGIENE Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste, in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs.