Nobel Winner Ignored Calls, Thinking They Were Spam

One of the winners of this year's Nobel Prize in economics says he ignored two telephone calls before learning of his honor from Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, per the AP. "I didn't answer either because I thought it was a spam call," said Paul Romer of New York University Monday. Then he checked caller ID and realized that someone from Sweden was trying to get hold of him, tweets New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum. "So he called back and, after waiting on hold, learned he'd won the Nobel Prize."

Romer teaches economics at NYU, where he founded the Stern Urbanization Project, which researches how policymakers can harness the rapid growth of cities to create economic opportunity and undertake systemic social reform. Romer also works with civic innovators as director of NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management. The university says he founded Aplia, an education technology application where students have submitted more than 1 billion answers to homework problems. He and William Nordhaus of Yale will split the prize of $1.01 million.

(More Nobel Prize in economics stories.)