Bhubaneswar (SunstarTV Bureau): In October each year, the Nobel Committee recognises and awards individuals or organisations for their contributions in specific fields. Fields considered for the awards include physiology or medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace work, and economic science.
The Nobel Prize is given to people who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” by a foundation established by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel in his will, read in Stockholm on 30 December 1896.
The Nobel Prizes and the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel have been awarded 609 times to 975 people and organisations between the years 1901 and 2021. A total of 943 individuals and 25 organisations are awarded as some have received the Nobel Prize more than once.
Nobel Prize winners 2021
Nobel Peace Prize 2021
- Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.”
Maria Ressa continues to expose abuse of power, use of violence, and growing authoritarianism in her native country, the Philippines by using freedom of expression. On the other hand, for several decades, Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov has defended freedom of speech in Russia amid challenging conditions.
Nobel Prize in Literature 2021
- Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
Gurnah is known for his novels and a number of short stories that are themed around the disruption of refugee’s
Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
- Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, Giorgio Parisi “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems.”
Syukuro Manabe, the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses, discovered theories to help make climate models that assist in detecting weather patterns.
Klaus Hasselmann’s methods have proven that global warming is a result of human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and Giorgio Parisi’s discoveries make many different and apparently entirely random phenomena understandable. Their application is not only limited to physics and extends to other fields including mathematics, biology, neuroscience, and machine learning.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021
- Benjamin List and David MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.”
List and MacMillan have been recognised for their contribution in making molecular construction easier by inventing a tool that helps in catalysis for producing asymmetric molecules.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021
- David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.”
Julius and Patapotian’s breakthrough discoveries launched intense research activities leading to a rapid increase in the understanding of how the human nervous system senses heat, cold, and mechanical stimuli.
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences
- David Card “for his empirical contributions to labour economics.”
- Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships.”
The three laureates have new insights about the labour market and have shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments. Their approach has spread to other fields and has revolutionised empirical research.
