Northwestern University has awarded its 2008 Nemmers Prizes in economics and mathematics to professors at Stanford University and at Imperial College, London. The prizes, which carry $150,000 stipends, were announced on Tuesday.

The economics-prize winner is Stanford’s Paul R. Milgrom, who is being recognized for “contributions dramatically expanding the understanding of the role of information and incentives in a variety of settings, including auctions, the theory of the firm, and oligopolistic markets.”

The math-prize winner is Imperial College’s Simon K. Donaldson, who is being honored for “groundbreaking work in four-dimensional topology, symplectic geometry, and gauge theory, and for his remarkable use of ideas from physics to advance pure mathematics.”

As part of the prizes, the winners will deliver public lectures at Northwestern over the next few years. The awards program was created with $14-million bequeathed by a former Northwestern faculty member and his brother. —Andrew Mytelka