MINNEAPOLIS
When 90-year-old Leonid Hurwicz got a phone call around 6 a.m. from someone talking about the Nobel Prize, he thought it was a joke.
It wasn’t.
Hurwicz, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota, learned Monday that he would share the Nobel economics prize with two other Americans and become the oldest person ever to win a Nobel.
When the telephone rang early in the morning, Hurwicz, who is hard of hearing, says he gave it to his wife, Evelyn.
“And she kept saying something about Nobel Prize, so I thought, `Well, that for sure is somebody’s idea of a joke.’ But then when I got a few other phone calls, I began to believe in it,” Hurwicz recalled with a laugh.
Hurwicz, who lives in south Minneapolis, said he was “delighted” to win the Nobel, which he shares with Eric S. Maskin, 56, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, and Roger B. Myerson, 56, a professor at the University of Chicago.
