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I got excited because I thought maybe Emmy Noether was going to get a stamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noeth
by andrewflnr 6y ago
I got excited because I thought maybe Emmy Noether was going to get a stamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
- bilbo0s 6y agoI thought it was Madame Curie.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ardit33 6y agoSame, Marie Curie is by far much more recognized/contributed to nuclear physics... She was the first woman to win Nobel, (and won it twice)
- ISL 6y agoMeasuring parity violation is one heck of a thing. Wu is less of a household name, but within fundamental physics, her experiment is one of the great milestones.
- input_sh 6y agoFor context, only four people won Nobel twice (Frederick Sanger, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen and Marie Curie), and from that list, her is the only name I recognise.
- OskarS 6y agoShe's also the only one of them who won in two different scientific disciplines: physics and chemistry. Linus Pauling (who was pretty famous to a previous generation, though maybe not quite as famous as Curie) won also won in two different disciplines, but one of them was the peace prize.
- evanb 6y agoIf you’re on this website you may be interested to learn that Bardeen won for inventing the transistor. (His other prize was for explaining super conductivity; he won for experimental work and separately for theoretical work!) Bardeen didn’t bring his young children to the Nobel award ceremony the first time. The King asked him where they were and jokingly said Bardeen had ought to bring them next time. And so he did!
- webmaven 6y agoOther than Curie, I recognized Pauling, though admittedly more from his obsessive crackpot advocacy for taking massive doses of vitamin C. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7547741/vitamin-c-myth-pauling
- HarryHirsch 6y agoRB Woodward won the 1965 Chemistry Nobel Prize for his astounding achievements in total synthesis. Some people say that he should have been awarded a part of the 1973 prize that went to Fischer and Wilkinson for sandwich compounds, and he definitively would have received it again in 1981 together with Fukui and Hoffmann for explaining how orbitals influence stereochemistry.
- OskarS 6y agoYeah, I ran through the list in my head as well: Marie Curie, Irene Joliot-Curie, Lise Meitner and Emmy Noether were the ones that came immediately to mind. All of them deserve to be well-known.
- rob74 6y agoAlthough Marie Curie probably wouldn't object to other female scientists being honoured: https://xkcd.com/896/ https://xkcd.com/896/
- btilly 6y agoBoth Emmy Noether and Madame Curie cannot be so honored because the first rule of https://about.usps.com/who/csac/#criteria https://about.usps.com/who/csac/#criteria is that the subject has to be American or critical to American history. Therefore an American citizen who is a physicist can be recognized for her contribution to physics, but a German or French citizen cannot be.
- thwoeruweoir234 6y agoEmmy Noether moved to the US in 1933 in light of Nazi persecution and died in the US. I guess she never obtained citizenship in the 2-3 years she was there.
- colejohnson66 6y agoFrom the link (and in the same rule): > Other subjects may be considered if the subject had significant impact on American history, culture or environment. What would qualify someone for that? And why would those two (Noether and Curie) not qualify?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SamBam 6y agoI would assume that someone like Lafayette could be on a stamp. I'd expect the qualification would be, basically, would you expect to find this person in a book of US History (and not merely as a member of a foreign power, like, say, Churchill)? I think that this is probably a reasonable "you know it when you see it" situation, but I'm sure you could find edge-cases if that was your goal. I doubt Marie Curie would say that she had anything to do with American history.
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoYou don’t think Marie Curie has anything to do with the country that ran the Manhattan Project?
- zem 6y agosame!
- trash3 6y agoAnd I thought Emilie du Chatelet
- JKCalhoun 6y agoI thought Lise Meitner. Not U.S. though.
- iancmceachern 6y agoMs. Wu seems great too...
- sn9 6y agoThe person you were replying to was less implying Wu is undeserving of the honor and more suggesting that when one hears "First Lady of Physics", most would think of Noether (which I feel is likely accurate for those versed in physics history).
- andrewflnr 6y agoYep, nothing against Wu.
- mikhailfranco 6y agoNoether was a mathematician, not a physicist.