On 27 November 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament, giving the largest share of his fortune to a series of prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace – the Nobel Prizes. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden’s central bank) established The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
At the Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies on 10 December the Nobel Laureates receive three things: a Nobel Diploma, a Nobel Medal and a document confirming the Nobel Prize amount. Each Nobel Diploma is a unique work of art, created by foremost Swedish and Norwegian artists and calligraphers. The Nobel Medals are handmade with careful precision and in 18 carat green gold plated with 24 carat gold.
The Nobel Medals in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine and Literature are identical on the face: it shows the image of Alfred Nobel and the years of his birth and death (1833-1896). Nobel’s portrait also appears on the Nobel Peace Prize Medal and the Medal for the Prize in Economic Sciences, but with a slightly different design. The image on the reverse varies according to the institution awarding the prize.
Nobel Prizes 2013: Full list of winners
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 – Americans James Rothman (Yale), and Randy Schekman (University of California) and German-born Thomas Sudhof (Stanford University) have been awarded the world’s top medicine prize “for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 – The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to Francois Englert (Belgium) and Peter W. Higgs (Britain) for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 – The Nobel prize in chemistry was jointly to Martin Karplus (Harvard University), Michael Levitt (Stanford School of Medicine) and Arieh Warshel (University of Southern California) for “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 – Alice Munro (Canada) won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her tales of the struggles, loves and tragedies of women in small-town Canada that made her what the award-giving committee called the “master of the contemporary short story.”
The Nobel Peace Prize 2013 – Nobel Peace Prize for 2013 is to be awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) “for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical
weapons.”
2013 Prize in Economic Sciences – The 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded jointly to Eugene F. Fama (USA), Lars Peter Hansen (USA) and Robert J. Shiller (USA) “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”.
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