List of Ig Nobel Prize Winners - 2001

2001

• Astrophysics – Presented to Jack Van Impe and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all the technical requirements for the location of Hell.
• Biology – Presented to Buck Weimer of Pueblo, Colorado for inventing Under-Ease, airtight underwear with a replaceable charcoal filter that removes bad-smelling gases before they escape.
• Economics – Presented to Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of the University of British Columbia, for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax.
• Literature – Presented to John Richards of Boston, England, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, for his efforts to protect, promote, and defend the differences between the plural and the possessive.
• Medicine – Presented to Peter Barss of McGill University, Canada, for his impactful medical report "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts".
• Peace – Presented to Viliumas Malinauskas of Grūtas, Lithuania, for creating the amusement park known as "Stalin World".
• Physics – Presented to David Schmidt of the University of Massachusetts, for his partial explanation of the shower-curtain effect: a shower curtain tends to billow inwards while a shower is being taken.
• Psychology – Presented to Lawrence W. Sherman of Miami University, Ohio, for his influential research report "An Ecological Study of Glee in Small Groups of Preschool Children".
• Public Health – Presented to Chittaranjan Andrade and B.S. Srihari of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, for their probing medical discovery that nose picking is a common activity among adolescents.
• Technology – Presented jointly to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, for patenting the wheel in the year 2001, and to the Australian Patent Office (IP Australia) for granting him Innovation Patent #2001100012