USU ’74 alumnus wins Nobel Prize for Economics
A USU alumnus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Lars Peter Hansen, a 1974 graduate of USU in mathematics, was awarded the prize along with colleagues Eugene F. Fama and Robert J. Shiller “for their empirical analysis of asset prices,” the RSAS announced in a press release on Monday.
“Lars Peter Hansen developed a statistical method that is particularly well suited to testing rational theories of asset pricing,” according to the press release.
“We are excited that Lars has received this well-deserved recognition,” said James MacMahon, dean of USU’s College of Science, in a statement on Monday. “We’ve followed his many accomplishments through the years and appreciate his faithful support of his alma mater.”
“My time at USU was very important to my development as a scholar,” Hansen said in a fall 2008 issue of the USU Alumni Association magazine. “Doug Alder told me, ‘Do something special and don’t just imitate others.'”
Hansen went on to earn a Professional Achievement Award from USU’s Huntsman School of Business in 2009 and an honorary degree from USU in 2012.
The three winners will be splitting the roughly $1.2 million prize, according to the RSAS.
Over the past week, the RSAS has also announced the winners of the five other Nobel Prizes: Medicine and Physiology, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Peace. The winners and their accomplishments are listed below.
Medicine and Physiology
“For their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells,” the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2013 was awarded to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C Sudhof, the Nobel Media announced last Monday.
According to the site nobelprize.org, Rothman, Schekman and Sudhof, each with their own separate contributions, “revealed the exquisitely precise control system for the transport and delivery of cellular cargo.”
This helps people to better understand neurological diseases, diabetes and immunological disorders, as they result from disturbances in this system, according to the press release.
Chemistry
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems” the RSAS said in a press release on Oct. 9.
“They started the development of methods that are now used to design new drugs computationally,” said Steve Scheiner of USU’s chemistry department.
Scheiner said before the developments of these models, scientists could only view chemical reactions on a large scale, which was insufficient for the full understanding of what was going on at a molecular level.
With these new models, scientists were able to see things on an enzymatic level and slow down the process to gain a better understanding of the processes at work and how they perform under different forces, Scheiner said.
Physics
Peter W. Higgs and Francois Englert were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles” called the Higgs boson, according to the press release from the RSAS.
“The Higgs is the culmination of 45 years of filling in the details of the Standard Model,” said Jim Wheeler of USU’s physics department.
Wheeler said the Higgs boson was actually an early prediction in the Standard Model of particle physics, but it is the last to be verified despite dozens, if not hundreds, of systematic searches.
Literature
Alice Munro, a Canadian author who nobelprize.org calls a “master of the contemporary shorty story,” won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Munro is known for her collections of short stories, including “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” which was the basis of the film “Away from Her,” according to nobelprize.org.
Munro, at 83 years old, is the most senior member of the incoming group of Nobel laureates.
Peace
The Nobel Peace Prize, which is the only prize to be handed out by five members of the Norwegian Parliament instead of a Nobel Committee, was given to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Steve Sharp of USU’s political science department said the Peace Prize often tries to either act as an award for something exceptional or to send a message.
“This is another example of the Nobel Committee trying to incrementally advance non-violent resolutions of conflicts,” Sharp said of the OPCW winning the award.
Sharp said the OPCW oversees the destruction of chemical weapons, and most states have signed on with the exception of a few states such as Egypt and North Korea.
In the press release, nobelprize.org said the award is for “extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons.”
– zack.oldroyd@aggiemail.usu.edu