No Polish scientist claimed a Nobel Prize this year, but one of the winners is of Polish extraction and two others used help from a Polish colleague.

Even though the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences did not select a Polish winner, the Polish scientific community has ample reason to be proud because this year's Nobel Prize for Economics went to Leonid Hurwicz, a Russian-born American researcher of Polish ancestry who was educated in Warsaw before World War II. Another Polish researcher, Prof. Józef Barna¶ of Poznań's Adam Mickiewicz University, worked with two European scientists who jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Hurwicz received the 2007 Nobel Prize for Economics together with two other U.S. economists, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson, for their work on "mechanism design theory" that looks at how well markets allocate and whether government intervention is needed. The citation for the economics award said the theory "allows us to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not. It has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes, and voting procedures. Today, mechanism design theory plays a central role in many areas of economics and parts of political science."

Hurwicz, who at the age of 90 is the oldest ever Nobel prize winner, is a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He initiated the theory, and it was further developed by Prof. Maskin of Princeton University and Prof. Myerson of the University of Chicago, the academy said.

Born in Moscow in 1917, Hurwicz fled to Poland with his family during World War I and spent the interwar period in Warsaw. Both of his parents were Polish.

"I left Russia before I could walk and spent my young years in high school and university in Poland," he said.

Hurwicz was in Switzerland as World War II broke out and did not return home, but made his way to the United States. "If I had still been in Warsaw in Poland, I probably would have been one of the victims of Auschwitz," said the economist, who is Jewish.

Hurwicz graduated in law from the University of Warsaw in 1938. He then studied at the London School of Economics (1938-1939), the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva (1939-1940), Harvard University (1941), and the University of Chicago (1940-1942). He received an honorary doctorate from the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) in 1994.

In evaluating Hurwicz's scientific achievements in connection with the honorary doctorate, Wojciech Maciejewski, a professor at the University of Warsaw, wrote at the time that Hurwicz's scientific interests initially concentrated on various theoretical problems in econometrics. In 1944-1946 Hurwicz was a member of a team that looked into econometric modeling, which laid the foundations for modern econometrics. Today, that group is known as the Cowles Commission. Another area of Hurwicz's research is related to optimizing economic decision-making processes.

Juliusz Kotyński, a professor at the Warsaw School of Economics, notes that "Hurwicz was concerned with the theory of mathematical programming and game theory, decision optimization theory, general balance theory, demand, consumption, as well as welfare theory, price theory, and development and planning theory. He also studied questions of decentralization and the efficiency of economic systems as well as resource allocation processes. He published works on the theoretical and practical aspects of institutional and economic transformation and development, including ownership changes in Poland."

This year's physics prize went to French scientist Albert Fert and German researcher Peter Grünberg for discovering giant magnetoresistance (GMR), a physical effect that has led to the development of a technology for reading data on hard disks. Fert and Grünberg discovered giant magnetoresistance independently of each other in 1988. This technology has made it possible to radically miniaturize hard disks in recent years, paving the way for their use in laptops and certain music players. As a result, increasingly smaller devices are capable of storing increasingly large amounts of data.

Many commentators as well as the prize winners themselves acknowledge the contribution of Polish physicist Józef Barna¶, a professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, who helped theoretically explain the giant magnetoresistance effect after it was discovered by Fert and Grünberg.

Barna¶ worked in Fert's laboratory for more than a year and then spent a year and a half in Jülich, Germany, working with Grünberg and his team. It was during this period that the team conducted the experiments that eventually led to the discovery of the GMR effect. "I was one of the theoreticians who explained Grünberg's 1988 experiment for which this German scientist won the Nobel Prize," Barna¶ says. "I arrived there in 1988. I joined the project as a theoretician. I wrote my first work explaining the theoretical basis for this effect together with Prof. Camley of Colorado University." Barna¶ adds that the scientists involved in the project knew that the effect of giant magnetoresistance would soon be applied in practice producing a breakthrough in technology.

The GMR effect was first used in industry in the 1990s. Today practically all computers are equipped with heads that rely on the GMR effect, Barna¶ says.

He adds that Fert and Grünberg expected to be selected, especially as many physicists had long seen them as shoo-ins for the prize. "I had a feeling they would win this year," Barna¶ said.

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