"Knock knock!
Who's there?
Nobel Prize!"
Not another knock-knock joke, but that is exactly what happened when Nobel Economics Prize winner Paul Milgrom was woken up at 2:15 am by his fellow winner and neighbour Robert Wilson to share the billion dollar news.
Even hours after the prize announcement on Monday, the Nobel Prize Committee was unable to reach Milgrom to share the news that he won the most prestigious economics prize. Finally, fellow winner and neighbour Robert Wilson and his wife decided to become the messengers on behalf of the Nobel Prize Committee. The elderly couple were at Milgrom's door in the middle of the night to share the news.
A video of Wilson, 83, ringing his 72-year-old Nobel partner's doorbell and knocking on his door in the middle of the night has been tweeted by Stanford University. Both of them are professors at Stanford and live on the same street.
The black and white security camera video shows Wilson and his wife, walking to Milgrom's door and ringing the bell. He then knocks on the door. In the footage, Wilson is heard saying, "You won the Nobel Prize. And so they are trying to reach you, but they cannot. They don’t seem to have a number for you."
After a few seconds, Milgrom responded, "Yeah, I have? Wow."
"When Wilson rang Milgrom's doorbell at 2:15 this morning, Milgrom's wife, who's in Stockholm, received a security-camera notification on her phone. She got to watch live as Wilson told Milgrom he'd won the," Stanford further tweeted.
Milgrom and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in economics for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats. The winners were announced on Monday in Stockholm by Göran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. "We're enthusiastic about what we do. We like it. And it's exciting. It's a great life to be able to live this way," the Nobel winners said in a joint statement.