Mathematics or Rheumatoid Arthritis

I'm sure it's a set-up, but I always appreciate how the fine people at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences carefully differentiate between the actual Nobel Prizes they award and their other fine prizes.  I mean, I'm sure the Crafood Prize in Mathematics or Rheumatoid Arthritis or the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel have their place, at their level, but no serious person is going to be confusing them with Nobels, no matter of self-promotion by economists notwithstanding.  After all, I've never heard anyone say they aspired to be a respected economist but found the work too difficult and settled for being a world-renowned mathematician or theoretical physicist, although the converse is so commonplace to be cliche (although they usually express it as wanting to do something more practical).  The one exception is Ed Witten, who was an undergraduate history major and then worked on McGovern's presidential campaign before realizing that he would never understand US politics and ended up getting his PhD in physics from Princeton and becoming his generation's Dirac.  

Thus, as Alfred Nobel's great-grandnephew expressed it, the Economics Prize remains "a PR coup by economists to improve their reputations."  Hayek even argued in his acceptance speech that the prize should not exist, saying, "The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. ... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally."  

Of course, the most hilarious thing is that they literally had to change their rules after John Nash won to specify that the prize was for work in the social sciences.  I guess Nash's work was too mathematical, and the economists were concerned that one day they would no longer be winning their own prize.  Nash, of course, never thought about winning the prize whereas he was pissed off for the rest of his life about not winning a Fields Medal, which in some ways is more prestigious than a Nobel, and it's said it may have contributed to his mental collapse.

Ed Witten, of course, won a Fields Medal, even though he's primarily viewed as a physicist.  Then again, he's not human.