Google great at guessing Nobel winners

THE BEST WAY TO FIND OUT if someone is going to get a Nobel Prize is by using the same algorithm used by the search outfit Google.

Two US boffins Sergei Maslov and Sidney Redner used the Pagerank algorithm on a list of the most important publications in physics.

On the basis of 353 million articles published in Physical Review Letters from 1853 to 2003, they found that the top ten of the most cited articles were written by Nobel prize winners.

The one exception was Nicola Cabibbo. His studies were the basis of the research that led the Nobel Prize for Physics to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. µ

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