Mohan and all interested posters:
Nobel Price in Economics awarded to AMARTYA SEN
October 14, 1998
Nobel Price in Economics Awarded
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Filed at 5:58 a.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Amartya Sen, a citizen of India who teaches at Britain's Trinity College in Cambridge, won the Nobel Prize in Economics today for his studies of famines and other catastrophes.
He earned the prestigious prize ''for his contributions to welfare economics,'' which have helped in the understanding of the economic mechanisms underlying famines and poverty, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
Sen, 64, gained recognition for his studies of the Bangladesh famine of 1974 and other catastrophes in India, Bangladesh and the countries of the African Sahara.
The prize is worth $978,000.
Americans Robert Merton and Myron Scholes won the 1997 prize for their work on how to value so-called ''derivatives'' such as stock options. The award caught the attention of many because it recognized work with clear practical applications, rather than the highly theoretical work that usually gets the prize.
However, their work was tarnished last month when the hedge fund in which they were partners, Long-Term Capital Management, went bust, necessitating a $3.6 billion bailout. It's not clear whether Long-Term Capital's failure was due to the misapplication of Merton's and Scholes' theories or whether the theories themselves were faulty. But the debacle inevitably tainted a prize that many have criticized.
This honor is the only Nobel not established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite. It was created in 1968 to mark the tercentenary of Sweden's central bank.
On Tuesday, Robert B. Laughlin of Stanford University, Horst L. Stormer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University won the Nobel physics prize for discovering how electrons can change behavior and act more like fluid than particles.
The chemistry prize went to Walter Kohn of the University of California at Santa Barbara and John A. Pople of Northwestern University for developing ways of analyzing molecules in chemical reactions.
On Monday, the medicine prize was given to three Americans -- Robert Furchgott, Louis Ignarro and Ferid Murad -- for their work on discovering properties of nitric oxide, a common air pollutant but also a life-saver because of its capacity to dilate blood vessels.
Furchgott is a pharmacologist at the State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn, while Ignarro works at the University of California at Los Angeles and Murad is at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.
The literature prize was awarded last week to Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago. The peace prize, the last in this year's series, is to be announced Friday.
The prizes are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Nobel.
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