A fellow geek wrote to gloat about his purchase of the American Scientists Commemorative Stamp Set. His post office doesn’t yet have the Buckminster Fuller sheets, but when they do, watch out for that mad rush!
We have:
a) Barbara McClintock, the first American woman to win a Nobel that she didn’t have to share with anyone else. Damn straight! Poor Rosalind Franklin,
b) J.W. Gibbs, who made my high-school AP chemistry class a living hell and dashed my hopes for a degree in chemistry to a million energetic molecules, what with physical chemistry out of my intellectual grasp until the waning semesters of my undergraduate career. Difficult concepts in organic chemistry, electricity, magnetism, optics and partial differential equations quickly gain clarity in my brain, but P-chem has inexplicably avoided me like I am diseased. Anyway …
c) John von Neumann, whose brain I love more for work in game theory and cellular automata than his obvious contribution to computing or the Manhattan Project, and
d) my main man, Richard P. Feynman, renaissance Genius extraordinaire. I like that the USPS employed his “smirking cad” portrait on the stamp.
When these stamps join other collections in my possession including the Sonoran Desert Commemorative, Broadway Musicals and Dinosaurs panes to name a few, D and my parents will undoubtedly ask again, “What’s the use of stamps you’re never going to use to mail anything with?”
And I’ll say, “They are beautiful, they are educational and … they are.”
Ah, this is cool. McClintock, Neumann, and Feynman, oh my! By the way, I don’t think Barbara McClintock was the first woman to win an unshared Nobel. I believe that one of Marie Curie’s Nobels (the chemistry one in 1911) was awarded only to her, and there might have been others too.
You’re absolutely right, Rahul. McClintock was the first woman to win the Nobel in medicine/physiology. The first one to win an unshared Nobel in any category was indeed Marie Curie in 1911 followed by Dorothy C. Hodgkin in 1964 for chemistry. Thanks.
Ma’ man Feynman.. I’m so fond of using his line “What do you care what other people think!”
Although I used to be a science nerd in college, I still appreciate the recognition the field deserves. And,
I love having a variety of stamps to choose from– my inner geekiness is coming out!