The 2013 Kyoto Prize ceremony was held Sunday afternoon in Kyoto, Japan and the Inamori Foundation awarded three Americans for lifetime global achievement in the areas of Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences and Arts&Philosophy.

We like jazz music but this site is not Jazz 2.0 so let's stick to the two relevant areas. 

The laureate in Basic Sciences is Dr. Masatoshi Nei, 82, an evolutionary biologist and professor at Penn State University, who made it possible to discuss evolutionary divergence, genetic diversity, and the mode of selection on genes in a quantitative manner by devising various statistical methods ― such as Nei’s Genetic Distance ― and applying them to molecular data. Using these methods,  Nei’s research has yielded important contributions to molecular evolutionary biology as well as many other academic disciplines, including ecology and conservation biology.

The Advanced Technologylaureate is IBM Fellow Dr. Robert Dennard, 81, an electrical engineer who invented the basic structure of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), which is now extensively utilized as an integrated circuit (IC) memory system. Since the 1970s, his innovation has immensely increased the capacity of digital information storage, leading to dramatic progress in information and telecommunications technology. Dennard and colleagues also proposed guidelines called “scaling theory” to miniaturize field-effect transistors (FET), which play key roles in most ICs (including DRAM) thereby promoting an epochal advance in IC technology.  

Robert Heath Dennard and Masatoshi Nei

Each laureate received a 20-karat gold Kyoto Prize medal, a cash gift of 50 million yen (about US $500,000) and a diploma in recognition of lifelong contributions to society.

The Kyoto Prize is Japan's highest award for global achievement.