NPR News

As the last of this year's Nobel Prize winners are announced and media focus shifts away from Sweden, two things are clear about the winners.

One: They have all done laudatory work in their respective fields.

Two: Aside from the European Union, which was awarded the Peace Prize, all of this year's Nobel laureates are men.

They join the ranks of hundreds of people who have received the awards over the past 111 years. But what is surprising about the list of Nobel laureates is just how few women are on it.

Two Americans took the Nobel prize for economics this morning.

Alvin E. Roth, of Harvard University, and Lloyd S. Shapley, of University of California, Los Angeles, were given the award "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."

If that doesn't mean anything to you, the Nobel committee explained that their work essentially explained an important economic problem: How can different economic actors find each other.

They explain:

H.W. Brands is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace.

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.