Five winners join the list of Nobel Laureates published by Cambridge

All three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics have had work published by Cambridge University Press.

Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, were named as the recipients of the prize for their contributions to the understanding of complex systems, including the Earth’s climate.

Hasselmann, from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, and Manabe, of Princeton University in the US, were jointly named winners of one half of the prize for their work, which laid the foundations of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity affects it.

It was Syukuro Manabe’s work in the 1960s that first showed how increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere led to higher temperatures on the Earth’s surface and paved the way for the development of the climate models in use today.

About 10 years later, Klaus Hasselmann created a model that linked together weather and climate, explaining why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic. He also developed ways to spot the tell-tale signs that both natural phenomena and human activities imprint in the climate, methods that have been used to prove rising temperatures in the atmosphere are due to manmade carbon dioxide emissions.

Both men have had work published by the Press. Hasselmann was co-editor of the book Dynamics and Modelling of Ocean Waves (1994), while Manabe was a contributor to Climate Change, The IPCC Scientific Assessment, published by the Press in 1990.

The other half of this year’s Nobel Prize went to Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University Rome, whose work made it possible to understand and describe hidden patterns in the seemingly random behaviour of complex materials and phenomena in areas including physics, mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

He has co-authored two books for the Press, the textbook Quantum Mechanics (2009) and Theory of Simple Glasses (2020), which deals closely with the topic for which he shares the Nobel Prize.

Phil Meyler, the Press’ Publishing Development Director (Scientific, Technical and Medical), said: “The Press has a proud history of publishing work by authors who have won or gone on to win the Nobel Prize in their various fields. That all three winners of this year’s prize for physics have been published by us is very gratifying and shows how we are supporting our University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

“The range of material published, including textbooks, academic works and scholarly research, also demonstrates the depth of our publishing and how we are placing work from some of the world’s brightest minds into the hands of both researchers and students.”

The Press has also published work by the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, and one of the three winners of the prize for Economic Sciences, Guido Imbens.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, was the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007), part of the Cambridge Companions to Literature and Classics series. He won the Nobel Prize for what was described as “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

Guido Imbens was one of three winners in economics, sharing half of the prize with Joshua Angrist. Their work provided new insights into the labour market by showing how precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments – situations in which chance events or policy changes result in groups of people being treated differently, in a way that resembles clinical trials.

Imbens’ co-authored the book, Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences, which was published by the Press in 2015.

Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1901 in recognition of an individual or group’s contributions to ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’ in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and later Economic Sciences.

The Press has published the works of more than 170 Nobel Prize Laureates in our books, journals and the journals of our partners, including such names as Albert Einstein, Steven Weinberg, Douglass C North, and Angus Deaton. Cambridge is also proud to have published the works of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

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