2001 Nobel Prize Announcements <Prev Next>

The 2001 Peace, Literature, Economics, Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine 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 12, 2001 (11:00 a.m.) Prize: PEACE Awarding institution: The Norwegian Nobel Institute And the winners are... The United Nations and Kofi Annan Date: Thursday, October 11, 2001 (1:00 p.m.) Prize: LITERATURE Awarding institution: The Swedish Academy And the winner is... V.S. Naipaul "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories" Date: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 (15:15 p.m. at the earliest) Prize: ECONOMICS Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the winners are... George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz "for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information." Date: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 (11:45 a.m. at the earliest) Prize: CHEMISTRY Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the winners are... William S. Knowles, and Ryoji Noyori "for their work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions" and K. Barry Sharpless "for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions" Date: Tuesday, October 9, 2001 (11:45 a.m. at the earliest) Prize: PHYSICS Awarding institution: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences And the winners are... Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and Carl E. Wieman "for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates" Date: Monday, October 8, 2001 (11:30 a.m. at the earliest) Prize: PHYSIOLOGY or MEDICINE Awarding institution: The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute And the winners are... Leland H. Hartwell, R. Timothy Hunt, and Paul M. Nurse for their discoveries of "key regulators of the cell cycle." Date: Thursday, October 4, 2001 at 7:30 pm EDT Prize: IG NOBEL PRIZES Awarding institution: The Annals of Improbable Research And the winners are: MEDICINE Peter Barss of McGill University, for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts." PUBLISHED IN: The Journal of Trauma, vol. 21, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1. PHYSICS David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts for his partial solution to the question of why shower curtains billow inwards. BIOLOGY Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape. ECONOMICS Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia, for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax. REFERENCE:"Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity," Wojciech Kopczuk and Joel Slemrod, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001. LITERATURE John Richards of Boston, England, founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between plural and possessive. PSYCHOLOGY Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children." PUBLISHED IN: Child Development, vol. 46, no. 1, March 1975, pp. 53-61. ASTROPHYSICS Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. REFERENCE: The March 31, 2001 television and Internet broadcast of the "Jack Van Impe Presents" program. (at about the 12 minute mark). PEACE Viliumas Malinauskus of Grutas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as "Stalin World." TECHNOLOGY Awarded jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012. PUBLIC HEALTH Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents. REFERENCE: "A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2001, pp. 426-31.