  The last Nobel Prize of the Millenium in Physics has been awarded jointly to
Professor Gerardus 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht in Holland and his
thesis advisor Professor Emeritus Martinus J.G. Veltman of Holland. According
to the Academy's citation, the Nobel Prize has been awarded for 'elucidating
the quantum structure of electroweak interaction in Physics'. It further goes
on to say that they have placed particle physics theory on a firmer
mathematical foundation. In this short note, we will try to understand both
these aspects of the award. The work for which they have been awarded the Nobel
Prize was done in 1971. However, the precise predictions of properties of
particles that were made possible as a result of their work, were tested to a
very high degree of accuracy only in this last decade. This was done in a
series of measurements in the experiments in the accelerator laboratories at
CERN (Geneva) and Fermilab. To understand the full significance of this Nobel
Prize, we will have to summarise briefly the developement of our current
theoretical framework about the basic constituents of matter and the forces
which hold them together. In fact the path can be partially traced in a chain
of Nobel prizes starting from one in 1965 to S. Tomonaga, J. Schwinger and R.
Feynman, to the one to S.L. Glashow, A. Salam and S. Weinberg in 1979, and then
to C. Rubia and Simon van der Meer in 1984 ending with the current one.
