The inventor of the MP3 is up for a lifetime achievement gong at the Inventor of the Year awards, a new awards programme set up by the European Commission and the European Patent Office. Karlheinz Brandenburg will compete with vacuum cleaner man James Dyson and Federico Faggin, the Italian 'father of the microchip', for the prize, which will be awarded on 3 May.
Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute For Digital Media Technology as well as being a professor at the Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau Technical University, created the basis of MP3, AAC and most other digital 'audio compression schemes' while writing his PHD at University Erlangen-Nuremberg in the late eighties, and he's worked in that domain ever since.
There's more info on the awards at http://www.european-inventor.org