Gabelli created the prize to honor an individual, student, or practitioner who has made an outstanding contribution to enlarge the field of value investing. The company has committed to fund the prize with $1 million and will grant future awards at its annual client meetings.

Mr. Whitman has managed the Third Avenue Value Fund since 1990. For over 30 years, he has been a Distinguished Management Fellow at the Yale School of Management and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, as well as Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, named in his honor. Mr. Whitman is the author of The Aggressive Conservative Investor (New York: Random House, 1979) and Value Investing: A Balanced Approach (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999). Mr. Whitman graduated from Syracuse University magna cum laude in 1949 and received a Masters degree in Economics from the New School of Social Research in 1958.

In awarding the prize, Professor Bruce C.N. Greenwald, who heads the Heilbrunn Graham & Dodd Research Center at The Columbia University Graduate School of Business, stated that, "Marty Whitman's name is associated with special situations investing - in the areas of spin-offs and distressed debt, for example, where traditional investors have shied away from investing. Because value in these types of undermined areas is only measurable with a degree of complexity and some significant amount of research effort, Marty Whitman's contribution is especially important." Professor Greenwald observed that, "Within the surprising institutional trend of investing in hedge funds...Marty Whitman is the person who enabled investors to think intelligently about large-cap, growth-related, franchise stocks as special situation investing."

GAMCO Investors, Inc. (NYSE: GBL - News), through its subsidiaries, manages assets of private advisory accounts (GAMCO), mutual funds and closed-end funds (Gabelli Funds, LLC), and partnerships and offshore funds (Investment Partnerships) and is known for its Private Market Value with a Catalyst(TM) style of investment. As of March 31, 2006, GAMCO Investors, Inc. had $27.6 billion in assets under management.