PRIZES

IGNOBEL PRIZES IN ECONOMICS

Nobel did not leave money for a prize in mathematics or economics. Mathematics is recognised in the Fields Prize. A New Zealander won this for the mathematics of knots and John Nash won one for his work on game theory (featured in the film "A Beautiful Mind").
The economics prize thought to be a Nobel prize by journalists is really a prize donated by a Swedish Bank. It should be called the "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Honour of Alfred Nobel". These are not prizes highly thought of as too often they are awarded for contradictory ideas.

At Harvard University some scientists with their typical sense of humour have set up "Ignobel Prizes". Previous prizes have been:

2005: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

2004: The Vatican for outsourcing prayers to India.

2003:Karl Schwärzler and the nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.

2002:The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut & Hauspie [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 U.S.-based unless otherwise noted.]

2001:Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia [and who has since moved to Columbia University], 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.

2000:The Reverend Sun Myung Moon, for bringing efficiency and steady growth to the mass-marriage industry, with, according to his reports, a 36-couple wedding in 1960, a 430-couple wedding in 1968, an 1800-couple wedding in 1975, a 6000-couple wedding in 1982, a 30,000-couple wedding in 1992, a 360,000-couple wedding in 1995, and a 36,000,000-couple wedding in 1997.

1998: Richard Seed of Chicago for his efforts to stoke up the world economy by cloning himself and other human beings.

1997: Akihiro Yokoi of Wiz Company in Chiba, Japan and Aki Maita of Bandai Company in Tokyo, the father and mother of Tamagotchi, for diverting millions of person-hours of work into the husbandry of virtual pets.

1996: Dr. Robert J. Genco of the University of Buffalo for his discovery that "financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive periodontal disease."

1995: Awarded jointly to Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank and to Robert Citron of Orange County, California, for using the calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial institution has its limits.

1994: Jan Pablo Davila of Chile, tireless trader of financial futures and former employee of the state-owned Codelco Company, for instructing his computer to "buy" when he meant "sell," and subsequently attempting to recoup his losses by making increasingly unprofitable trades that ultimately lost .5 percent of Chile's gross national product. Davila's relentless achievement inspired his countrymen to coin a new verb: "davilar," meaning, "to botch things up royally."

1993: Ravi Batra of Southern Methodist University, shrewd economist and best-selling author of The Great Depression of 1990 ($17.95) and Surviving the Great Depression of 1990 ($18.95), for selling enough copies of his books to single-handedly prevent worldwide economic collapse.

1992: The investors of Lloyds of London, heirs to 300 years of dull prudent management, for their bold attempt to insure disaster by refusing to pay for their company's losses.

1991: Michael Milken, titan of Wall Street and father of the junk bond, to whom the world is indebted.

GENUINE NOBEL PRIZE.

Frederick Soddy (1877-1956)is best known as a pioneering chemist who worked with the greatest scientist of last century, Ernest Rutherford. Together, they worked out how radioactivity resulted from the atoms of certain elements disintegrating, transmuting one element into another element in sequences which they uncovered. Rutherford gave us the term half life as a measure of the rate of radioactive decay.

Soddy was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1910 and was awarded a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for his work on isotopes, a name which he gave to atoms of an element that had different atomic weights but the same number of protons. He was a member of the Swedish, Italian, and Russian academies of science. During his career he held positions at McGill (where he worked with Rutherford), Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Oxford. Like Rutherford, he was concerned that science was used for the benefit of humanity.

He saw that the worlds problems were related to faulty economics and applied himself to it without the preconceived notions which cripples conventional economic study. He questioned the fact that banks only had to back their loans with low reserve deposits and showed that economic growth was limited by thermodynamics, in particular the second law of thermodynamics (heat moves only from hot to cold, running down the universe). He wrote: "Science and Life" (1920) London, "Cartesian Economics: The Bearing of Physical Science on State Stewardship." (1922) Hendersons, "The Inversion of Science" (1924) London, "Wealth, Virtual Wealth, and Debt" (1926) London, "Money versus Man" (1933) New York, "The Role of Money" (1933) London, "The Arch Enemy of Economic Freedom" (1943) Oxford, and "The Story of Atomic Energy" (1949) London. Return to home page.