Poet-writer Chandrashekar Kambar has been conferred with the Jnanpith Award. The award was given to him in recognition to his contributions to Kannada literature.

The award:

The Jnanpith Award is a literary award. It is one of the two most prestigious literary honours in the country, the other one is Sahitya Akademi Fellowship. The award was instituted in 1961.

Who is eligible for the honor?

Any Indian citizen who writes in any of the official languages of India is eligible for the award. The award is presented by the Bharatiya Jnanpith, a trust founded by the Sahu Jain family, the publishers of the The Times of India newspaper.

Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley of U.S. have been awarded the Nobel economics prize for studies on the match-making that takes place when doctors are coupled up with hospitals; students with schools; and human organs with transplant recipients.

As per Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, their research has sparked a “flourishing field of research” and helped improve the performance of many markets.

What is their research?

This Prize has been given to them “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”. The work is concerned with the best possible way to allocate resources, such as in school admissions or organs to patients who need transplants. It was a form of economic engineering, designing markets for situations where traditional market mechanisms based on price are not applicable or do not work well. Matching is a fundamental property of many markets and social institutions. For eg. matching jobs to workers, husbands to wives, doctors to hospitals, kidneys to patients etc.

The European Union (EU) won the Nobel Peace Prize for furthering peace in the continent after World War II.

Why this award to EU?

The award is given to EU in acknowledgment to its past as well as continuing efforts to maintain peace in the region. The EU was war-torn region during WW II, but now it is the union of 27 nations.

Chinese author Mo Yan won Nobel Prize for literature. His real name is Guan Moye. The Swedish Academy recognized the writer as a one "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

Some of his notable works:

• Red Sorghum
• The Republic of Wine
• Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

In 2011, the prize was given to Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer.

Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of America together won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing methods to observe the bizarre properties of the quantum particles without disturbing them. This thing was previously thought unattainable.

What is their invention?

• Their inventions are the methods by which quantum particles like atom, electron or photon can be observed while preserving their quantum properties. Earlier, the problem was that these particles after they are separated from surrounding lose their specific properties due to interaction with the environment. But using the novel methods it will now be feasible to separate and observe these particles without destroying their characteristics.

What can be its possible implementation?

• The ground-breaking research has already enabled scientists in construction of ultra precise clocks. Its major application can be in the development of new superfast computers based on quantum physics.