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THE NOBEL PRIZE
Founded one hundred years ago by the inventor of dynamite,
the Nobel Prize is the world's most celebrated and controversial
honor.
It grants its winners instant celebrity and acclaim for "service
to mankind," despite accusations that it is too trendy, arbitrary,
and narrow-minded.
It is - of course - the famous international award given
yearly since 1901 for achievements in physics, chemistry,
medicine, literature and peace. The prize consists of a medal,
a personal diploma, and a prize amount. In 1968, the Sveriges
Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) instituted the Prize in Economic
Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize.
And celebrating the most outstanding scientists, in a century
dominated by technological and scientific revolutions, really
means celebrating men and women that changed the world, sometimes
nearly single-handedly.
In the collective imagination, the Nobel laureate is a scientist
(people often forget of the nobel for literature, economy
and peace) whose work has been acknowledged by his/her community
as truly outstanding.
However, there is often a lot of gossip and back-ground diplomacy
about such award. A book reveals several little known stories
that can enlighten this side. In examining both its fame and
notoriety, Burton Feldman opens up the Nobel institution and
process: how it originated, how it works, and how it is influenced
by outside pressures (political, moral, personal and academic).
The Nobel Prize is an extraordinary work that never fails
to surprise, provoke, and entertain.
Many things about the prize formula have changed since Alfred
Nobel created the foundation, but the spirit is the same.
In the beginning, more than three prize winners could share
a Nobel Prize, although this was never practiced. Paragraph
four of the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation was amended in
1968, restricting the number of prizewinners to only three.
Previously, a person could be awarded a prize posthumously
if the nomination was made before February 1 of the same year.
Since 1974, the Prize may only go to a deceased person who
has been named as prize winner for the year (usually in October)
but who dies before the Prize Awarding Ceremony on December
10.
The lack of a Nobel prize for mathematics was the object
of many discussions. The truth is probably that ALfred Nobel
was more interested in applied science, and used to see Maths
as a more abstract field. However mathematicians and computer
scientists have now come up with their own awards, respectively
the famous Fields medal and the Turing award.
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