FACTBOX: Nobel Physics prize -- Who are the winners?

(Reuters) - Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday, for theoretical insights that have provided a deeper understanding of what happens in the tiniest building blocks of matter.

Here are some details about the winners:

* YOICHIRO NAMBU:

-- Nambu is one of the leading figures in the development of modern particle physics and made seminal contributions that introduced the concept of broken symmetry to the field.

-- He was born in Tokyo in 1921 and received his first degree in 1942. He became a professor of physics at Osaka City University in 1950 and two years later gained his doctorate from the University of Tokyo. In the same year he moved to the United States to the Institute for Advanced Study. He became a U.S. citizen in 1970.

-- He is now the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Physics in the University of Chicago and the Enrico Fermi Institute.

* MAKOTO KOBAYASHI and TOSHIHIDE MASKAWA:

-- Kobayashi and Maskawa laid the theoretical foundations to our modern understanding of how the laws of physics differed for matter and anti-matter.

-- They discovered that spontaneous occurrences that came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964 seemed to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe.

-- Kobayashi was born in April 1944 in Nagoya, Japan. He gained his doctorate in 1972 at Nagoya University. In June 2006, he became Professor Emeritus at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan.

-- Maskawa was born in February 1940. He gained his doctorate in 1967, also at Nagoya University. He later became Professor Emeritus at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University.

Sources: Reuters/www.nobel.org/