Nobel Prizes 2003

[Håkan Eriksson]

Just thought that the Nobel prize winners of the four sientific prizes could use some attention too. Here's a summary:

Physics

"for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids"

Alexei A. Abrikosov - USA and Russia
Vitaly L. Ginzburg - Russia
Anthony J. Leggett - United Kingdom and USA

More information here


Chemistry

"for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes"
"for the discovery of water channels"

Peter Agre - USA

"for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels"

Roderick MacKinnon - USA

More information here


Physiology or Medecine

"for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging"

Paul C. Lauterbur - USA
Sir Peter Mansfield - United Kingdom

More information here


The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

"for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH)"

Robert F. Engle - USA

"for methods of analyzing economic time series with common trends (cointegration)"

Clive W. J. Granger - United Kingdom

More information here

 

[Archer 007]

Congradutions to the winners, even though I dont understand a lick of what they accomplished.

 

[jack merchant]

I took a course on time series analysis in college (and failed miserably due to my complete lack of aptitude for mathematics) so I did run into some of Granger's stuff. Not Engle's though.

Though their theories themselves are a highly abstract set of formulas with an excessive amount of Greek letters in them, the methods these two economists developed seem to me to be highly useful for economic research and financial analysis. There doesn't seem to be a real big idea in economics anymore (the so-called 'new-economy'-theories being thoroughly discredited by the Internet crash) so it stands to reason that new methods would be prized over new theories.

 

[cgannon64]

I think the Nobel prize commitee could just start making up people and theories, and no one would notice.

"The award for the 2004 Nobel Prize for Economics goes to Herming Groner, for his studies in the time-set analyses of Eastern market flucuations as compared to the time-release effects of the Western job-to-machine ratio in industrialized and semi-industrialized democratic nations..."

 

[Mega Tsunami]

Here in Britain we had the newspapers full of all this rubbish about footballers forgetting to take their drug test, and hidden on page 21 of the papers was a few small bits about the fact that we (the UK) had won 3 Nobel prizes.
Typical Brits – always ready to moan about a few bad things and almost ignore the good bits.
We should be rejoicing. Instead we moan about our footballers. What a country.

 

[SeleucusNicator]

Well, winning many Nobel prizes each year is typical for the US and the UK. I don't see why a big deal should be made of it.

If one year nobody from the US or UK won a Nobel, THEN I could see front-page material on the matter.