Newsmakers

Bell wins Ramsey Medal

David E. Bell, the George M. Moffett Professor of Agriculture and Business, has won the 2001 Frank P. Ramsey Medal in recognition of his distinguished contributions to the field of decision analysis. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the Decision Analysis Society. Recipients are judged to have made substantial contributions to mathematical decision theory and its application to important classes of real decision problems. Previous winners include Harvard Business School professors emeriti Howard Raiffa and John W. Pratt, as well as the late Robert O. Schlaifer.

Wolff gets Commander’s Cross, Kinkeldey Award

President Johannes Rau of the Federal Republic of Germany recently awarded Christoph Wolff the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Wolff, the William Powell Mason Professor of Music, received the award at a ceremony on Thursday, Nov. 15 in conjunction with the German president’s visit to Harvard. The award recognizes Wolff’s contributions to trans-Atlantic scholarship and his role in the recent rediscovery and restitution of the famous musical archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie.

Wolff also received the Otto Kinkeldey Award for his book “Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician” (W. W. Norton, 2000), at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Atlanta on Nov. 17. The award recognizes the most distinguished book by a member of the society published during the previous year.

‘Sleigh Ride’ writer remembered

“Once Upon a Sleigh Ride,” a documentary that chronicles the life and work of American composer Leroy Anderson ’29, will be aired by WGBH today, (Thursday, Nov. 29) at 7:30 p.m. The Cambridge native composed “Sleigh Ride,” “The Syncopated Clock,” and a host of Harvard-related arrangements, including “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard.” Anderson directed the Harvard Band in 1934-35.

– Compiled by Andrew Brooks