The contribution made by Dr't Hooft and Dr Veltman is, as is often the way with the physics prize, mind-bogglingly complex.

ECONOMIST: The 1999 Nobel prizes

Though they did not, themselves, perform the synthesis, Dr't Hooft and Dr Veltman tidied up its mathematics to such a degree that useful predictions about the properties of unknown sub-atomic particles became possible.

ECONOMIST: The 1999 Nobel prizes