By Elizabeth Cloutman

Three local residents attended the Nobel Prize Centennial Dec. 4-13. Bill and Kathy Sharpe of Los Altos and Gene van Tamelen of Los Altos Hills attended the ceremony for this year’s laureates, as well as other events during the 10-day celebration.

Bill Sharpe and van Tamelen are both professors emeritus at Stanford University. The Sharpes and van Tamelen were three of the very limited number of people invited to attend the Stockholm celebration.

The Nobel Foundation invited all past Nobel laureates to attend the centennial. Sharpe, now a retired economics professor, won the 1990 Prize in Economics for his capital asset pricing model.

Van Tamelen came at the invitation of his former graduate student, K. Barry Sharpless, a research scientist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with William Knowles and Ryoji Noyori.

Van Tamelen, a retired chemistry professor, said he had also worked with Knowles and Noyori during his years at Stanford.

The Sharpes and van Tamelen described the celebration as both impressive and congenial. “It’s a phenomenal occasion (especially for) Sweden,” Bill Sharpe said.

All Nobel prizes are officially presented Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, requested in his will that awards be set up to honor work that benefits mankind. The Nobel Foundation began naming laureates in 1901.

The Nobel Foundation presents awards in literature; physics; chemistry; medicine or physiology; economic sciences and to those who have contributed to peacemaking efforts.

The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony always takes place in Oslo, Norway, because Norway and Sweden were united countries when the prize was first presented, van Tamelen said. The ceremony for the rest of a year’s laureates occurs in Stockholm.

Each Nobel laureate receives approximately $1 million. If more than one recipient is named for a particular prize, they share the money. No more than three people can share the award.

The Dec. 10 ceremony was the third for Sharpe. In addition to being named a Nobel Prize winner in 1990, he also returned for the award’s 90th anniversary celebration the following year.

For van Tamelen, watching Sharpless receive the Nobel in chemistry was like “having one of your children do well.”