The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name of the award is a pun on the Nobel Prize, which it parodies, and on the word "ignoble".
Jaroslav Heyrovský was a Czech chemist and inventor. Heyrovský was the inventor of the polarographic method, father of the electroanalytical method and recipient of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his invention and development of the polarographic methods of analysis. His main field of work was polarography.
Sir Peter Mansfield was an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Mansfield was a professor at the University of Nottingham.
Sir Nevill Francis Mott was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes insulating.
Sir Owen Willans Richardson was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson's law.
Robert McCredie May, Baron May of Oxford was an Australian scientist who was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, President of the Royal Society, and a professor at the University of Sydney and Princeton University. He held joint professorships at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He was also a crossbench member of the House of Lords from 2001 until his retirement in 2017.
John Charles Polanyi is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics.
Sir Michael Pepper is a British physicist notable for his work in semiconductor nanostructures.
Michael John Seaton was an influential British mathematician, atomic physicist, and astronomer.
Sir Eric Albert Ash was a British electrical engineer, past Rector of Imperial College and President of IEE, UK. He was elected an international member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for innovations in optics and acoustics and for leadership in education.
Yakir Aharonov is an Israeli physicist specializing in quantum physics. He has been a Professor of Theoretical Physics and the James J. Farley Professor of Natural Philosophy at Chapman University in California since 2008. He was a distinguished professor in the Perimeter Institute between 2009-2012 and is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and at University of South Carolina. He is president of the IYAR, The Israeli Institute for Advanced Research.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester is one of the largest and most active physics departments in the UK, taking around 250 new undergraduates and 50 postgraduates each year, and employing more than 80 members of academic staff and over 100 research fellows and associates. The department is based on two sites: the Schuster Laboratory on Brunswick Street and the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Cheshire, international headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
Sir Andre Konstantin Geim is a Russian-born Dutch–British physicist working in England in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
John Frederick Nye was a British physicist and glaciologist. He was the first to apply plasticity to understand glacier flow. He was a member of the University of Bristol's physics department for 66 years.
Michael Lawrence KleinNAS is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Science and director of the Institute for Computational Molecular Science in the college of science and technology at Temple University in Philadelphia, US. He was previously the Hepburn Professor of Physical Science in the Center for Molecular Modeling at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan is an Indian-American scientist. He is currently the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Physics at Harvard University. His work centers around understanding the organization of matter in space and time. Mahadevan is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.
Sir Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov is a Russian–British physicist. His work on graphene with Andre Geim earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Novoselov is a professor at the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials, National University of Singapore and is also the Langworthy Professor of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.
Jonathan Peter Keating is a British mathematician. As of September 2019, he is the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and from 2012 to 2019 was the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Science (2009–2013). He has made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics, in particular to quantum chaos, random matrix theory and number theory.
Irina Grigorieva, Lady Geim is a Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester and Director of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and the Applications of Graphene. She was awarded the 2019 David Tabor Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics and was elected as a Fellow of the Institute.
