Sweden held its lavish annual Nobel awards ceremony on Tuesday, which was attended by laureates and royals, but their ranks were depleted because many VIPs flocked to the memorial for anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

“Nelson Mandela embodied the struggle for freedom, democracy and humanism, and was one of the greatest statesmen of our time,” chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation Carl-Henrik Heldin said in his speech.

More than 1,300 guests attended the ceremony in Stockholm City Hall to dine, chat and listen to laureates, including Britain’s Peter Higgs and François Englert of Belgium, who won the Nobel Prize for physics.

Higgs paid tribute to fellow scientist Robert Brout, who died in 2011.

“It is a matter of great regret for both of us that Robert Brout did not live to share the prize with us. The fact that it has been awarded to just the two of us implicitly recognises his contribution, as is right,” he said. He also thanked the scientists at the Cern laboratory in Geneva that confirmed the existence of the Higgs particle last year.

Other guests receiving Nobel awards from King Carl XVI Gustaf included Ahmet Uzumcu, director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He recalled the “burning, blinding and suffocating” horrors of chemical weapons as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

Uzumcu said such toxic tools of warfare have an “especially nefarious legacy”, from the trenches of World War I to the poison gas attacks in Syria this year.

Swedish newspapers spotlighted the hastily rearranged seating at the table of honour after Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and Princess Victoria cancelled their attendance to fly to South Africa.

The ceremony was also missing Canadian Nobel-winning author Alice Munro, 82, who was unable to attend because of ill health. Her daughter, Jenny Munro, accepted the award in her place.

US-based scientists Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel shared the chemistry award for developing powerful computer models used to predict chemical reactions. In his speech, Levitt used the example of a car to illustrate how fast computers have developed in recent years and helped advance science.

“If cars had improved like computers did, then the new model would cost 20 kronor, would go a million miles an hour, would carry 50,000 people in comfort and park in a shoebox. This powerful change has pushed all science ahead,” he said.

Americans James Rothman and Randy Schekman and German-American Thomas Sudhof collected the medicine prize for their breakthroughs in explaining how the transport system in our cells works.

The economics award, which is not an original Nobel Prize but created in Nobel’s honour by Sweden’s Central Bank in 1968, was given to Americans Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller for their methods on studying trends in asset markets.

The awards are worth $1.2 million each, reduced from $1.5 million last year under an austerity drive by the Nobel Foundation that manages the roughly $450 million in capital forming the base for the awards.

Despite that, there was no less glamour on show, although Sweden’s Princess Madeleine – who attracts huge attention in the country’s media – was absent because she is pregnant.

The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in neighbouring Norway was also less well-attended than usual because of the memorial rites for Mandela.

South African president F.W. de Klerk (right) and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela holding up medals and certificates after they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1993. Photo: Reuters

Remembering Madiba

The late South African president Nelson Mandela, long a jailed dissident in his own country, won the Nobel Peace Prize exactly 20 years ago. A memorial ceremony on his behalf was held in South Africa on Tuesday, just as this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in Stockholm as it always is on December 10, the anniversary of benefactor Alfred Nobel’s death.

Although out of the limelight in recent years because of the infirmities of age, Mandela, or Madiba, the clan name by which he was affectionately known to many South Africans, remained a revered symbol of the fight he led against the nation’s apartheid regime.