Improbable Research

The Ig® Nobel Prizes

The Twentieth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will happen on Thursday, September 30, 2010. Tickets will go on sale August 1. The 2009 prizes were awarded at the 19th First Annual ceremony.

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.

"Last, but not least, there are the Ig Nobel awards. These come with little cash, but much cachet, and reward those research projects that 'first make people laugh, and then make them think'" — Nature

The winners (the complete list, from 1991 through the present)

Recent news (the Ig blog)

The ceremonies (all years — details, video, opera librettos)

Some thoughts about the Igs, about some of the winners, about what they may have done, what the Igs are, what they aren't, and what it could all mean.

The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize winners, joined by nine amused Nobel laureates, take a bow the conclusion of the ceremony. Photo: Richard Baguley.

Dutch filmmaker Bahram Sadeghi made six mini-documentaries, each about a different Ig Nobel Prize winner. Click the image above to watch the first in the series.

Andy Jordan of the Wall Street Journal attended the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, and brought his videocamera. Click the image above to watch his report.

2009 Ig Nobel Public Health Prize winner Dr. Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention -- a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be converted into a pair of protective face masks, assisted by Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle, Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman. Click the image above to watch.

The Russian network NTV traveled the world to interview Ig Nobel Prize winners. Their ten-minute report was originally broadcast in December 2007. The image here shows an NTV reporter visiting the (Literature Prize-winning) Nudist Research Library in Kissimmee, Florida.

WCVB's Chronicle program did a five-minute introduction to the Ig in 2009. Click the image above to watch it.

2004 Ig Nobel Peace Prize winner Daisuke Inoue -- the inventor of karaoke -- is serenaded by Nobel Laureates Dudley Herschbach (left), Richard Roberts and William Lipscomb, and by Studmuffins of Science creator Dr. Karen Hopkin. (Click on image to enlarge it) Listen to NPR's report.

Viliumas Malinauskus, founder of Stalin World, accepting the 2001 Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Photo: Caroline Coffman. (Click on image to enlarge it)

Every year, in a gala ceremony in Harvard's Sanders Theatre, 1200 splendidly eccentric spectators watch the winners step forward to accept their Prizes. These are physically handed out by genuinely bemused genuine Nobel laureates.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Student, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, and the Harvard Computer Society.