Prize Time

It is the time of the year when prize announcements are out fast and furious.

The ink has not yet dried on the news announcing that the 2007 Nobel prize for medicine has been awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells". (I notice that Mario Capecchi is yet another Italian expatriate who, like Fermi and Segre before him, has become a US citizen.)

In mathematics/CS, László Lovász has received the Bolyai Prize, and Ben Green, Hershel Smith Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University (UK), will receive the 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize "for his phenomenal contributions to number theory by himself and in collaboration with Terence Tao, that have changed the face of combinatorial additive number theory."

Tomorrow is the turn of the Nobel prize for physics. It'll be interesting to see who receives it. I hope for an award to an Italian in Italy :-)