[Opinion] Global Renowned Prizes

Dr. Tim Berners Lee, who was instrumental in the development of the World Wide Web, has become the first winner of the Millennium Technology Award. Dr. Berners Lee has accomplished a great achievement in global network development and popular access to information via the Internet. Abandoning his intellectual property rights, he provided the technologies he developed to the world free of charge.

Because the Nobel Prize has no technology-related category, the Finnish government in 2002 established a foundation and made the Millennium Technology Award. It is now considered one of the best technology awards in the world. It is said that this foundation, selecting recipients every two years, will grant a financial award of 1 million euros.

The Abel Prize is the Nobel Prize of the world of mathematics. The Norwegian government took the initiative in establishing this prize in 2002 by setting up a foundation. The prize is named after the renowned Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel; it awards 750,000 euros to a new winner every year. The Pulitzer Prize, which was founded by the “king of newspapers,” Joseph Pulitzer, in 1917, is the Nobel Prize of the press. It is the award for newspapers and journalists who achieved the best results over the past year in four categories ranging from journalism, literature, drama, to music. There are 21 sections of award in it.

The field of mathematics is not a Noble Prize category because Nobel’s will did not include it. There are several rumors regarding the reason for this omission. One is that Nobel was dumped by a woman and she was a famous mathematician. Others are that Nobel did not regard mathematics as a practical field of science that can yield benefits to humanity, and that there was already a mathematics prize that was popular among Scandinavians at that time.

In any case, the Nobel Prize is a globally recognized award, and the number of Nobel Prize winners from a particular country or university is regarded as a standard of achievement. Four countries—the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France—can claim 76 percent of all Nobel Prize winners. As for colleges and universities, the University of Chicago in the U.S. and Cambridge University in the U.K. have produced 75 winners each. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. has produced 57 winners, and Oxford University’s 45 and California Institute of Technology’s 29 follow that.

South Korea has only one Nobel Peace Prize winner. That’s why we place such great expectations on Hwang Woo-seok, a professor of Seoul National University, who has made several breakthroughs in the field of life science. I hope that all the other professors will concentrate on their own researches more earnestly, with the goal of winning Nobel Prizes.

A guest editorialist and lawyer Bae Kuem-ja, e-mail: baena@chol.com