Santa Barbara Professors Earn Nobel Prizes in Economics, Physics
UC Santa Barbara economics professor Finn Kydland and physics professor David Gross have been awarded 2004 Nobel prizes in their respective fields. The prizes bring to five the number of Nobel Prizes won by UCSB faculty in the past six years.

David Gross

Kydland shares the economics prize with Edward C. Prescott of Arizona State University “for their contribution to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles.” Kydland and Prescott earned their Ph.D.s at Carnegie Mellon University, where Kydland later taught before joining the UCSB faculty in July.

Finn Kydland

Gross, director of UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, shares the physics award with H. David Politzer of Cal Tech and Frank Wilczek of MIT. Wilczek also served on the UCSB faculty from 1981 to 1989. The trio earned the prize for the “discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction,” which helps explain the force that holds atomic nuclei together and pens quarks together inside protons and neutrons, where they cannot be seen.

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