1993

Nobel Prize in Physics

Russell A. Hulse · Joseph H. Taylor Jr.

Hulse and Taylor found the first binary pulsar — two neutron stars orbiting each other — in 1974, then watched for years as their orbit slowly shrank. The energy leaving the system matched Einstein's predictions for gravitational wave emission to extraordinary precision: the first indirect evidence that gravitational waves exist, nearly four decades before anyone heard one.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Kary B. Mullis · Michael Smith

Mullis invented PCR — the technique that takes a vanishingly small scrap of DNA and amplifies it into quantities large enough to read — while driving down a California highway. Smith developed site-directed mutagenesis, allowing researchers to rewrite specific letters of a gene at will. Both methods became so fundamental to molecular biology that it is now difficult to imagine working without them.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Richard J. Roberts · Phillip A. Sharp

Working independently in 1977, Roberts and Sharp discovered that genes in higher organisms are not continuous stretches of DNA but are interrupted by non-coding sequences — introns — that are spliced out when RNA is processed. The tidy picture of one gene, one protein had been wrong in an interesting and important way.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Toni Morrison

Morrison's novels — Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye — moved through slavery, its aftermath, and modern American life with a visionary force that the committee found both poetic and necessary. She was the first African-American woman to receive the prize.

Nobel Peace Prize

Nelson Mandela · F.W. de Klerk

De Klerk unbanned the ANC and released Mandela from prison in 1990; Mandela, having spent 27 years there, led the negotiations that followed. The prize went to both men for what they managed to build together out of those unlikely materials.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Robert W. Fogel · Douglass C. North

Fogel used quantitative methods to overturn received wisdom about the economic role of American railroads and the profitability of slavery; North developed theories explaining how institutions — the rules and habits that structure society — shape long-run economic performance for better or worse. History, it emerged, was not beyond the reach of careful measurement.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Paul Williams Jr. · Kenneth Newel

Their paper 'Salmonella Excretion in Joy-Riding Pigs' documented that pigs transported over long distances shed significantly more Salmonella bacteria, increasing contamination risk. The title alone secured the award; the food safety implications were, in fact, genuine.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

James Campbell · Gaines Campbell

The Campbells invented the perfume-impregnated scent strip, a device that simultaneously made magazines smell of something and gave their readers headaches. An entire industry of olfactory advertising followed, suggesting that headaches are not, commercially speaking, a deterrent.

Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine

James Nolan · B.W. Stillwell · J.N. MacAninch

Their published study provided a systematic clinical approach to zipper-related penile entrapment — a minor surgical emergency that the medical literature had, until that point, addressed only sporadically. The committee felt it deserved more systematic attention than it had received.

Ig Nobel Prize in Mathematics

Robert Faid

Faid calculated, and published, the exact probability that Mikhail Gorbachev is the Antichrist: 710,609,175,188,282,000 to 1. The methodology by which one arrives at a number this specific was not fully disclosed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Peace

Pepsi-Cola Philippines

Pepsi ran a lottery in the Philippines and accidentally announced the wrong winning number, causing riots when millions of people holding the number 349 believed they had each won a million pesos. For briefly and unintentionally uniting the Filipino populace around a common grievance, the committee judged this a contribution to peace in the spirit, if not the letter, of the word.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Juris Hartmanis · Richard E. Stearns

Their 1965 paper 'On the Computational Complexity of Algorithms' established that different problems require fundamentally different amounts of computation, and introduced the complexity classes that now underlie all of theoretical computer science. The question of how hard a problem really is turned out to be a subject in its own right.

Andrew Wiles announces proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

On 23 June, Wiles announced at a Cambridge conference that he had proved Fermat's claim — no three positive integers satisfy a^n + b^n = c^n for any n greater than 2 — a problem open since 1637. A gap in the proof was found and then, with Richard Taylor, repaired by September 1994; the complete work was published in 1995. Fermat had claimed a proof of his own that the margin was too small to contain; the margin Wiles needed was 358 years.

Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission

Hubble had been launched with a mirror ground to the wrong prescription. In December, Space Shuttle astronauts on STS-61 installed corrective optics and a new camera, and the telescope that had been an embarrassment became the instrument it was designed to be. Few repairs have produced more science per wrench-turn.

Mosaic web browser released

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA released Mosaic 1.0 on 22 April — the first graphical browser to show images alongside text on the same page. The web had existed for two years; Mosaic was the first program that made it look like something a person without a Unix workstation might want to use.