Both Emmy Noether and Madame Curie cannot be so honored because the first rule of 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.
I 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.
Winston Churchill's mother is American and he is also one of 8 people in history to be granted honorary American citizenship. Therefore he is American enough that a case can be made for putting him on a US stamp.
Lafayette would, of course, qualify on his own merits because he was directly important to US history. But in addition he is another of the 8 honorary US citizens in history.
I think you're reaching. Obviously every inventor or discoverer affects the course of history in every country that uses that invention or discovery. We could put Marconi on as "critical to American history" because we never might not have the war without the radio. Or put Martin Luther on, because without him a bunch of protestants wouldn't have crossed over on the Mayflower. Or Mendel because without the understanding of genetics, our GMO companies wouldn't be making billions.
The only mention in the United States in Marie Curie's Wikipedia article is a brief tour she did of the US in her later years to raise money.
Beware of confusing standing on the shoulders of giants and the one pulling the trigger. Might as well blame Isaac Newton for the bomb while you're at it.
Maybe a simple way to think about it is this: Curie was a Polish-French physicist, and so a collector would more expect her to be honored by a postage stamp issued by Poland or France... and indeed she has, more than once. I also see some Marie Curie stamps issued by French colonies, which was probably thought to contribute to the unity of the empire.
Emmy 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.
Yeah, 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.
Measuring 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.
For 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.
If 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!
She'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.
RB 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.
The 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).
Fortunately, if immortality is what you're after (rather than just the money), there are other, surer ways to get that. Being the first experiment to verify the defining property of one of the four forces of nature will do it. It's impossible to learn about weak parity violation without learning about Madame Wu. So everyone who matters will remember her :)
> The Nobel committee has many sins to answer for.
According to Magdolna Hargittai, it's not clear that this is one of them. She wrote that there were actually three experimental groups that verified parity violation, with unclear priority, and none of them were eligible for the Nobel in 1957 because all published after the deadline for that year.
And so we arrive at the question at the heart of this story: was it a fair decision not to award Wu a share of the prize? After all, there was an “empty slot” – according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation a maximum of three people can share a prize in a given category. The NBS experiment was the first to verify parity violation on 27 December and Wu had suggested and was actively involved with the experiment. But Friedman and Telegdi, who also started their experiments in the late summer of 1956 and were already doing measurements in October, may have had some preliminary results by December too. However, what really counts is publications, and in that the NBS group and the Garwin–Lederman–Weinrich group were side by side, with Garwin and Lederman actually finishing their report days before the NBS group did. Whichever way success is measured, it would have been hard to pick one particular experimentalist for the prize.
As it turns out, this discussion is superfluous for legalistic reasons. As Bárány pointed out, “The awarded work must have been published before the year of the prize, in this case before 1 January 1957.” Since all three experimental studies were published in early 1957, none of the experimentalists could have been considered for the prize that year. The Nobel Committee could have decided to wait another year to award the prize for parity violation, but with the three experiments and the large number of physicists involved, the decision would always have been a hard one. Also, the committee needed strong candidates in 1957 and it is by no means certain that they had any as strong as Lee and Yang to put forward.
Chien-Shiung Wu is the "First Lady of Physics" here.
> Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-born American physicist, will be commemorated with a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) stamp for her significant contributions in nuclear physics during her 40-year career. More specifically, Wu’s experiment on parity violation that had a monumental impact on particle theory and floored physicists at the time, reports Adrian Cho for Science.
Completely unrelated: "The first lady of the internet" has a more colorful story behind it. I'd recommend looking it up. Depending on what sources you find, this story might not be entirely SFW. :)
Has Maria Goeppert-Mayer had a stamp? She was instrumental in discovering that electron shells fill from the outside in (this is still not taught in most classes - see her 1955 paper) She was a Nobel prize winning physicist, and until the modern era of Politically Correct Nobels, only the second woman to have won a Nobel in Physics other than Marie Curie.
Hm, usually when I really need a stamp I just print it at the post office as I never know beforehand how much will the thing cost. It does make letters a bit dull (though I only send those to corps so it's not like there is somebody there to be delighted)
Some countries issue non-denominated stamps, which cost (when purchased) the amount to send a letter, but are still valid to send that letter even if the postage rate later increases.
In the UK, these include "First class", "Second class", "First class large" etc stamps. In the USA, there's a "Forever" stamp.
I have a few, as it's easier to stick a stamp on my grandma's birthday card than either visit a post office, or buy postage online. But I only send about two ordinary letters a year.
I think we have something similar in France but I'm not sure. I remember that the one time I actually needed to send letters which I have pre-stamped, was when I was sending applications to universities. Fun thing happened though, as the postage has increased _the day after_ I've bought and stamped my envelopes. So then when coming to post office I needed to buy something like three 2cent stamps.
I refuse the tyranny of auto-pay (auto-withdraw?).
Not only does auto-pay stir up nightmarish scenarios in my mind of dying and having auto-pay continue to pay for subscriptions, but I like the brutal reminder of just how much internet, water, electricity, credit card (etc.) are costing me.
I rarely have to but since about 1991 I log into my bank (in 1991 it was via quicken and at some point became through their website) and type in their address and the amount. The bank sends a check.
This is a forum frequented by US folks and to my continued surprise, checks still seem to be a normal mode of payment. A US client snail-mailed us a check about a year ago - we first needed to figure out what the process is to cash that. And it took a month for payment to go through.
As an interesting side note: There are cases where you want to use a check in Germany as well. There’s what’s called a “Bundesbankscheck” which is a check vouched for by the Bundesbank and it’s cash-equivalent. So instead of carrying large amounts of cash you can just carry one of those. Relevant for cases which require immediate payment.
I lost my house in a fire recently, and the insurance claims process goes something like this:
* Insurance agent gives you a check for $XXX,XXX, payable to you AND your mortgage holder.
* You endorse it.
* You MAIL the check to the mortgage holder.
* They endorse it.
* They take their cut and mail the remainder back to you as another check.
Scared me to death, putting an endorsed check for $hundreds of $thousands in the mail. But the process is evidently enshrined in law... probably not much changed from a century ago.
I still regularly use checks to pay for water and to a few contractors. My small city charges a silly fee to pay by card and spending $0.55 and 5 minutes of time is worth it. Contractors prefer checks for the same reason, and will sometimes offer a discount for doing so. Credit card transaction fees add up.
Electronic wire payments are default in europe and usually either free or a few cents (no percentage) - no one settled invoices via CC here. They clear next day usually, for a few euro extra you can have them clear pretty much immediately.
Cashier's checks are insured against insolvency of the issuing bank by the FDIC, so they are backed by the US Government. However, that scenario would be fairly rare (even in the scope of bank insolvency), as the FDIC's requirements to issue cashier's checks are fairly strict - enough so that it's common for smaller banks and credit unions to actually pay a different bank to issue their cashier's checks. Take a close look at a cashier's check issued by a credit union, for example, and you will typically see that it is actually drawable against a commercial bank somewhere else that the CU contracts for this purpose. Western Union used to have a business unit that coordinated these arrangements and handled the technical side (verification service etc), but I think they spun it off to a different payments company.
Sigh... it's a well-known nickname of hers, see for instance:
Caijian Jiang, Tsai-Chien Chiang (2014) Madame Wu Chien-Shiung: The First Lady of Physics Research. World Scientific.
In many, many textbooks she's referred to as Madame Wu. No, no one called Maria Goeppert Mayer, Nobel Prize in physics 1963 Madame Goeppert-Mayer. That's something of a peculiar term of endearment/respect (idk) for Chien-Shiung Wu that caught on for some reason.
The oldest reference I could find is: Gloria Lubkin, 'Chien-Shiung Wu, The First Lady of Physics Research', Smithsonian, Vol. I (January 1971), 52-57.
I am unable to find an online copy of that issue.
There are only a few publications with that phrase before ~2000, and only as citations to the Smithsonian article.
The nickname became popular with the publication of "Wu Jianshong, The First Lady of Physics", a 1996 biography by Caijian Jiang. https://www.worldcat.org/title/wu-jianshong-the-first-lady-o... . It's in Chinese - I believe the citation you give is for an English translation.
This isn't generally true at all. Ella Fitzgerald has been "the First Lady of Song" since forever, various women have been called the First Lady of rock, pop, this or that sport, etc.
In general I think I've only heard "First Lady of X" refer to a spouse when X is a country. In any other case it's always somebody famous in their own right.
Even accepting that, just put her name in the headline too. It's not the first article I've seen about someone who hasn't gotten the recognition they deserve that also fails to put their name in the title.
It's intentional clickbait, providing a cliffhanger in the title ("first lady of physics? Who is that?") so you click through to the article for the answer.
This is a perpetual problem for which there is no good solution because historically women typically were known primarily as someone's wife. So we don't really have a well-developed set of words and rubrics for how to show our respects for women in a way that is both clearly feminine in character and also clearly indicates they made it on their own merits and not as someone's wife/mom/daughter/whatever.
I don't know how this will be solved. Some people don't even like the idea of needing it to be clearly feminine or female nomenclature.
Actually this is your own misconception. First Lady as a title means the highest ranking woman in a field or art as well. In a way the wives of heads of state are the highest ranking women in the political field also. That's why the title makes sense in both cases.
Nearly all the top physicists in the US with relevant knowledge took part in the Manhattan Project. Even Einstein, the pacifist, lent his name to the effort to persuade the US government to build an atom bomb before the Nazis.[1]
I judge people much more by what they did after the war. Contrast Edward Teller's campaigning for the development of the H-bomb with the actions of Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe.
"...Wu did not receive the Nobel prize for her contributions to the groundbreaking find."
It's damn time these horribly unfair Nobel Prizes were grossly overhauled or scrapped altogether and replaced with something better.
Time and time again we hear of the Nobel Prize committee making both questionable and unfair decisions by failing to award deserving people and instead awarding the Prize on political grounds rather than merit, and or overlooking people who made
significant contributions to a discovery such as Wu, or bypassing deserving mavericks who have upset the establishment but still deserve to be honored (Fred Hoyle for instance). The fact that Nobel Prize awards cannot be awarded posthumously is also an utter disgrace.
The Nobel Prize system is a bloody sham more reminiscent of an age of patronage than it was even suitable for the 20th Century let alone the 21st.
The way of fixing it would be for some other philanthropist to offer alternative awards based on a much fairer system. The Nobels could then be easily undermined if an alternative prize system offered much higher prize money to Nobel winners for them not to accept their prizes after they were awarded. If nothing else, the publicly alone would bring the Nobels into disrepute once the wider world knew the reasons.
I'm well aware that rules governing the Nobel Prizes are fixed in stone by Alfred Nobel's estate but if it wanted to then Sweden could easily legislate law to override this arcane unfair system.
It's a good start that at least the US Postal Service is honoring Wu.
Are you conflating the Peace Nobel Prize with the other ones? AFAIK the only one constantly criticized is the Peace Nobel Prize, whose attribution works very differently from the "real" ones.
In particular, the rule limiting the award to three people needs to change. It was already a problem in Wu's case (she could have received the Nobel if not for that rule, along with several other experimental physicists who also confirmed the theory), and is now a critical problem because physics research today has a lot of huge team projects with dozens of authors.
For example, the paper announcing the first observation of the Higgs boson [1] had hundreds of authors - none of whom received a Nobel for the discovery (the Nobel, like the Nobel for weak parity violation, was awarded to the theorists alone).
But I'm not so sure about your proposed solutions. There are already many alternative rewards - Wu herself was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978 - and none come close to the public recognition that the Nobel has.
And is it really possible for the Swedish legislature to dictate that the foundation grant awards contrary to Nobel's will?
> But I'm not so sure about your proposed solutions. There are already many alternative rewards - Wu herself was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978 - and none come close to the public recognition that the Nobel has.
The Wolf Prize is only $100k, do any of the alternatives exceed the Nobel's amount of approximately $1 million?
As I said in my reply to dudul, I'm far from being alone in my criticism of the Nobel system (see links to my references there).
I'm not wedded to my alternative proposal, as I'm sure there are many other alternatives that would be suitable. My key point is about the sheer unfairness of the system. Your comment about the Higgs also illustrates the point.
Yes, there are other awards and prizes but usually they're only known by those who are in the fields for which the award is given - thus, unfortunately, the general public is unaware of the achievements of these people. The trouble with the Nobel Prizes is their universal notoriety, this is troubling when many of its awards seem unduly unfair.
I'll confine myself to the sciences for the moment. There's any number of great scientists that students have never heard of; they study the discovery - the physics etc. - but they haven't a clue who articulated the science or even when the discovery was made - or even the context of the discovery. This lack of context is very troubling for many reasons I've not time to go into here.
Not only do the Nobel Prizes exacerbate this problem but also they create stereotypes and cult figures at the expense of others. I firmly believe that it is not in the best interests of any field of endeavor for a prize to be given and cocontributors to not also be acknowledged.
For example, just about everyone on the planet knows the name Einstein but how many know of Hermann Minkowski? Sure, if you're a physicist you will have and also you'll be aware of how important his work was to Einstein, same with David Hilbert and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro but their names are almost completely unknown in the wider world.
Even here with Einstein we couldn't have a better example of Nobel Prize committee incompetence - as Einstein wasn't given its gong for either Special or General Relativity. If ever there was an oversight by the Nobel mob then this has to be it!
The Nobel Prizes idealize a few at the expense of many and in today's world this is turning out not to be an especially noble endeavor.
This is a long and involved matter and thus difficult to précis here, so I'm not a bit surprised I've ruffled feathers by touching on something that in some circles has become 'sacred'. And I'm sure anyone who is a potential recipient of a Nobel wouldn't like to hear what I've had to say.
It's worth remembering that in ways Nobel wasn't the most noble of people and that his Prizes were his way of cleansing his name into perpetuity - and to date his efforts have paid off par excellence.
BTW, let me assure you beyond doubt that I've never considered myself in line for one, so my comments are not just a case of sour grapes.
