1998

Nobel Prize in Physics

Robert B. Laughlin · Horst L. Störmer · Daniel C. Tsui

Störmer and Tsui cooled electrons in intense magnetic fields to temperatures near absolute zero and watched them behave collectively as if each carried a fraction of the electron charge. That a particle cannot have a fractional charge is one of the things physicists had been reasonably sure of; Laughlin's theoretical explanation showed why the collective behaviour of many electrons could produce something that looked exactly like it did.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Walter Kohn · John Pople

Kohn's density-functional theory made it possible to calculate the electronic structure of molecules by tracking electron density rather than the full quantum wavefunction — a simplification that turned a computationally intractable problem into a manageable one. Pople's Gaussian software put those methods into the hands of chemists who needed answers, not just theory.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Robert F. Furchgott · Louis J. Ignarro · Ferid Murad

Working independently through the 1970s and 1980s, the three researchers established that nitric oxide — a gas that had previously been associated mainly with exhaust emissions — is a signalling molecule the cardiovascular system uses to dilate blood vessels and regulate blood pressure. The mechanism is why nitroglycerin relieves angina and why certain drugs for erectile dysfunction work.

Nobel Prize in Literature

José Saramago

The Portuguese novelist wrote Blindness and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with imagination, compassion, and irony that the committee said enabled us to apprehend an elusory reality. He was a communist and an atheist, which made the prize, when it arrived, more interesting than usual.

Nobel Peace Prize

John Hume · David Trimble

The Good Friday Agreement, signed on 10 April 1998, established power-sharing institutions in Northern Ireland and ended three decades of violence that had killed more than 3,500 people. Hume of the SDLP and Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party were central to the negotiations; the committee gave them the prize for what they had managed to agree.

Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences

Amartya Sen

Sen's analysis of famine showed that food shortages are rarely the proximate cause — failures of distribution and entitlement are. His broader framework measured poverty not by income alone but by the freedoms and capabilities people actually have, which produced a more accurate picture and a more uncomfortable one.

Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jacques Benveniste

Benveniste returned for a second Ig Nobel, having now moved from claiming that water retains a memory of dissolved antibodies to claiming that this information could be transmitted over telephone lines and the internet. Water, it seems, had developed new capabilities since 1991.

Ig Nobel Prize in Biology

Peter Fong

Fong administered Prozac to clams and found that serotonin-reuptake inhibitors triggered spawning behaviour in the molluscs — contributing, in his words, to their happiness. Whether the clams experienced this pharmacological intervention as an improvement is a question that remains open.

Ig Nobel Prize in Physics

Deepak Chopra

For his unique interpretation of quantum physics as applied to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness, as expressed in his popular books and lectures. The actual physicists on the committee were, one imagines, charmed.

Ig Nobel Prize in Literature

Mara Sidoli

For her scholarly paper 'Farting as a Defence Against Unspeakable Dread,' which analysed a clinical case in which a patient deployed flatulence as a psychic defence mechanism. Psychoanalytic case literature contains many remarkable papers; the committee selected this one.

Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering

Troy Hurtubise

Hurtubise spent years and considerable personal funds designing and building a suit of armour intended to withstand a charging grizzly bear, then personally tested it, and filmed the process. The film was called Project Grizzly. The bear was not consulted.

Turing Award

ACM A.M. Turing Award

Jim Gray

Gray's work on transaction theory — the ACID properties, serializability, two-phase commit — established the conceptual foundations on which nearly every database system since has been built. He disappeared in January 2007 while sailing alone off the California coast; the search found nothing.

Fields Medal (1998 — awarded every four years)

Fields Medal

Richard Borcherds · Timothy Gowers · Maxim Kontsevich · Curtis McMullen

The 1998 medals went to Borcherds for proving the moonshine conjecture — an improbable connection between finite groups and modular forms — Gowers for functional analysis and combinatorics, Kontsevich for knot invariants and deformation quantisation, and McMullen for complex dynamics. Andrew Wiles, too old for the Fields Medal by a few years, received a special IMU silver plaque for Fermat's Last Theorem.

Lasker Award (Basic Medical Research)

Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Leland H. Hartwell · Yoshio Masui · Paul Nurse

Hartwell, Masui, and Nurse identified the molecular machinery that controls when a cell divides — cyclin-dependent kinases and the checkpoint mechanisms that make sure division does not proceed until the DNA is in order. Hartwell and Nurse later shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for work the Lasker committee had recognised three years earlier.

Accelerating universe discovered via Type Ia supernovae

Two independent teams — Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team of Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess — found that distant Type Ia supernovae are fainter than they should be if the universe's expansion were slowing down, as gravity would suggest. The expansion is speeding up. Something is pushing, and nobody knows what it is; the name 'dark energy' was coined the following year.

Super-Kamiokande establishes neutrino oscillation and mass

In June, the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan announced that atmospheric neutrinos were changing type — from muon-neutrinos to tau-neutrinos — as they passed through the Earth. A particle that oscillates between identities must have mass; the Standard Model had assumed neutrinos were massless, and this assumption was now wrong.

Caenorhabditis elegans genome published — first multicellular organism

On 11 December, the complete genome of the nematode worm C. elegans was published — the first multicellular animal to be fully sequenced. Its 97-million-base-pair genome, containing roughly 19,000 genes in an organism with exactly 959 cells, became a reference point for understanding how genes govern development in animals whose complexity goes beyond a single cell.

Zarya — first ISS module — launches

The Russian-built Zarya control module launched on 20 November from Baikonur, the first component of the International Space Station to reach orbit. The American Unity node followed on Space Shuttle Endeavour; crew members floated between the two joined modules for the first time on 10 December, inaugurating a structure that would be continuously inhabited for decades.

Google founded

Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on 4 September, having spent several years at Stanford developing PageRank — a way of ordering search results by the number and quality of other pages that linked to them. Within a few years it was the way most people found things on the web, and then it was a good deal more than that.