But (1) they don’t give it posthumously; (2) he deprecated his own Enzymology PhD dissertation, yet had me promise him that’d cite it in a refereed publication which I did, as the first person to do so; (3) Although there have been several Nobel prizes in Literature for people who published Science Fiction, it was almost never the Science Fiction as such that got them there (i.e. this year’s Doris Lessing, previously William Golding, Harry Martinson, Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature 1974 - Poem 62 from ‘Aniara’, 1956 (translation by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg, for heaven’s sake an epic science fiction poem adapted to apopular opera); (4) Nobel prizes not typical for Science Writing (though Sir Arthur C. Clarke has been shortlisted for a Nobel Peace Prize); (5) he came to distruct his invention of “Psychohistory” (in the original sense), originally based on a QM or Kinetic Theory metaphor of emergent behavior of large enough human populations, presumably up towards a mole of people, distructing it on the grounds of Chaos Theory. he’d originally based the Foundation Trilogy explicitly by scaling-up Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as he’d struggled into college as whether to major in Science or in History. The two do collide in Game Theory, to some extent.

My friend and editor Isaac Asimov was ashamed that, although a fine popular writer about Math and frequently using quantitative argument, had dropped out of Integral Calculus because, though he could get the homework assignment about Integration by Parts correct, it was — for the first time ever in any subject — NOT intuitively obvious to him. He was ashamed of his panic, yet never finished calculus, back in the 1940s when it was not required for a PhD is Chemistry or Biology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harsanyi0

(Yes, I could look it up with Google, but it’s still occasionally interesting now and then to engage in conversation.)