Two professors from outside Northwestern won the university’s Nemmers Prize in economics and mathematics last week last week. The winning professors, both from outside universities, will spend 10 weeks at NU working with faculty and students and will deliver a lecture to the public.
The winners, Paul Milgrom and Simon Donaldson, were awarded $150,000 stipends for outstanding achievement in their respective fields. The prize is one of the largest monetary awards given in economics and mathematics in the United States.
Milgrom was awarded the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics for his contributions to a variety of areas, including auction theory. He began his professorship at the Kellogg School of Management in 1979 and went on to teach at Yale University. He is now a professor at Stanford University.
“Paul is a great microeconomist and game theorist,” said Ehud Kalai, Kellogg professor and a long-time colleague of Milgrom. “(He) did some of his best papers here with Kellogg.”
Donaldson, who teaches as the Royal Society research professor at Imperial College London, received the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. He received the award in part for his work in four-dimensional topology, a branch of advanced mathematics related to geometry, and for his use of physics to advance pure mathematics, according to an NU press release.
“There are people in the math department whose research is closely related to his,” said John Franks, chairman of NU’s mathematics department. “His coming will bring a research presence that’s very helpful to the department’s further research.”
Donations from the late Erwin Nemmers, a former Kellogg faculty member, and his brother, the late Frederic Nemmers, who taught mathematics at University of Wisconsin, fund the biannual Nemmers Prizes. NU also endows the monetary awards, which have increased over the years.
“He was an esoteric millionaire,” Kalai said of Erwin Nemmers. “He really wanted to push knowledge of economics and wanted to establish this prize to compete with the Nobel Prize.”
Past award recipients, such as world-renowned mathematician Yuri Manin, decided to join NU’s faculty after spending time on the Evanston campus as a Nemmers winner, Franks said. Manin currently teaches two quarters a year in Weinberg’s mathematics department.
