Twelve men received the world's most prestigious science and literature awards on Tuesday, when the king of Sweden handed them Nobel prizes.
The ceremony was attended by 1,500 formally dressed guests, including members of the Swedish royal family, the laureates' families and Sweden's top business leaders. The event took place in Stockholm's Concert Hall in bracing Nordic winter weather.
Earlier, former US President Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
In Stockholm, King Carl XVI Gustaf presented the physics prize to Dr Raymond Davis and Dr Riccardo Giacconi of the United States and Dr Masatoshi Koshiba of Japan for exploring the principles of neutrino astronomy and making it possible to discover distant stars.
Dr Davis, 87 and ill with Alzheimer's disease, and Dr Koshiba, 76, shared half of the prize for their pioneering work in astrophysics, while Italian-born Dr Giacconi, 71, received the other half for work that helped launch X-ray astronomy.
The chemistry prize, also worth 10 million crowns ($1.11 million), went to Dr John Fenn, 85, of the United States, Switzerland's Dr Kurt Wuethrich, 64, and Mr Koichi Tanaka, 43, of Japan. They developed analytical tools to study large molecules such as proteins, which could lead to drugs to treat diseases.
In a documentary before the ceremonies, Mr Tanaka - who unlike most laureates does not have a doctorate degree - said he had come a long way from the shy teenager who could hardly open his mouth in front of even a small audience.
The 2002 medicine prize was handed to Dr Sydney Brenner, a 75-year-old Briton born in South Africa, Britain's Dr John Sulston, 60, and Dr Robert Horwitz, 55, of the United States. Their work, on how cells divide and die and how genes regulate this, has shed light on diseases from AIDS to cancer.
Novelist and essayist Mr Imre Kertesz, an Auschwitz survivor, got the literature prize for works that portrayed the Nazi death camp as "the ultimate truth" about how low man can fall. Mr Kertesz, 73, has said he would go on a spending spree with the prize money of about one million dollars.
The economics prize was handed to American-Israeli Dr Daniel Kahneman, 68, and 75-year-old Dr Vernon Smith of the United States, who sported a long ponytail. They are pioneers of behavioural research in economics, honoured for showing how psychology affects people's buying decisions and for developing laboratory tests in economics.
The coveted prizes were created by Swedish millionaire Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, whose will formed the basis for them. They have been handed out yearly since 1901.