David Gross and Frank Wilczek, and independently H. David Politzer, published their one-loop order Non-Abelian gauge theory results in adjacent 1973 Physical Review Letters papers. Both established a high-energy route to weak coupling; extrapolating into the low-energy region was a separate dynamical problem.[ref][ref]
The three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. David Gross's Nobel lecture describes the unexpected sign and their comparison of independent calculations.[ref] In his lecture The Dilemma of Attribution, H. David Politzer emphasizes that the prize marks a wider community's work and that a tidy prize-centered history hides how discovery actually proceeds.[ref]