Another Caltech Nobel :)

Colleges & Universities California Institute of Technology
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<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/06nobel.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/science/06nobel.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Bob Grubbs, a chemistry professor who has apparently taught some of my friends, has won the Nobel prize for his work in metathesis.</p>

<p>This brings the number of current Nobel faculty to 5.</p>

<p>Couldn’t resist, in the spirit of friendly scientific competition: MIT, whose faculty is over three times as big, now has 9. Harvard, by my count, has about 10, with its faculty of 2300, 8 times bigger.</p>

<p>Conclusion: if you want to maximize your probability of bumping into Nobelists, come here :)</p>

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<p>:) I just read it on a newspaper in Taiwan this morning. Excellent.</p>

<p>By the way, may I ask that how many Fields medalists and Wolf medalists are in Caltech? Never know that…</p>

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<p>Ben,</p>

<p>Since we have this happy occasion to celebrate, I wonder if anyone can answer the following query:</p>

<p>Most schools are overly “generous” in counting Nobel laureates. If we use Caltech’s strict definition of a) alumni b) faculty who received the prize while in residence or who moved to the university after receiving the Prize, how do the different schools rank? Anyone have that data? Maybe someone might do a paper on this. :)</p>

<p>I was discussing this with a colleague and we laughed at all the places that count any Nobel laureate who ever set foot on campus. Even the great Chicago has a tendency to inflate their counts unnecessarily.</p>

<p>P.S. You might also note that 7 Caltech (undergrad alums) have won the Nobel while about 9 or 10 from MIT have. Since MIT produced nearly 10 times as many students in the 20th century as Caltech (Remember there were very few Caltech alums before WWII) the difference in ratios is astonishing, with Caltech being something like 7/10,000 or better.</p>

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<p>Hah! I was thinking the same thing, Not quite old! Stanford in particular lists everyone who has ever had an appointment at the Hoover Institution, e.g. Gary Becker, who is really Chicago’s by rights. Etc.</p>

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<p>Where do you get 7/10000? The ratio is 7/10, and adjusting it for MIT’s 10-fold greater alumni production gives 7/1 in favor of Caltech. Of course, this is expected statistically. If Caltech were to quadruple its student body, it would not quadruple its number of nobels. It is easier to have higher average quality in a smaller sample.</p>

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<p>Not quite old is estimating that Caltech has had 10,000 undergrad alums, and out of those 10,000 7 were Nobel laureates, hence 7/10,000. Not quite old also estimates that MIT has had 10 times as many students, and with 9 or 10 Nobel laureates MIT’s ratio would be 10/100,000.</p>

<p>The 7/1 ratio you mentioned is the astonishing “difference in ratios” that Not quite old referred to.</p>

<p>To MIT’s credit, a great many of its students are engineers and mathematicians and such who would not be considered for Nobel prizes in the areas of Chemistry, Literature, Medicine, Peace, Economics, or Physics.</p>

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<p>Thank you for clarifying the awkward phrasing in my post, Omgninja.</p>

<p>With respect to quadrupling students and Nobels.</p>

<p>While you could argue that you wouldn’t necessarily quadruple Nobels, you could make the opposite argument as well. There might be increasing returns to scale or scope in research environments. I have heard people say that Caltech was too small – by which they meant that even adjusting for size, Caltech would be outperformed as a result of not having enough people for a “critical mass” or what have you.</p>

<p>For instance, looking at Nobel Prizes by country, there is clearly a spillover effect from the overall excellence of so many top American universities that gives the US an advantage beyond mere size. Since the top universities in Japan or Germany concentrate the cream of their students, they should have proportionately more Nobelists, but that is clearly not the case today. [For institutional and complicated political/economic reasons of course.] Conversely, before WWII, German universities such as Goettingen had disproportionately huge numbers of Nobel laureates, as did the Cavendish lab in Cambridge, England.</p>

<p>So it is a worthwhile observation that Caltech does better on a student adjusted basis than any other institution in the US. [In fact, this is also an answer to a CC poster who condescendingly remarked elsewhere that only 7 of the Caltech Nobelists were undergrad alums. Making the appropriate corrections goes dramatically in Tech’s favor.] After all, who would have expected that one of those alums would win it in Economics? If Barro eventually wins, that would be a second alum. Not bad odds for a small school without a “big” name in Econ.</p>

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<p>Actually, I count at least 15. There may be more, these are just the ones that I can verify right now. They are:</p>

<p>Roy Glauber, Robert Merton, Seamus Heaney, Elias Corey, Joseph Murray, Norman Ramsey, Dudley Herschbach, Nicolaas Bloembergen, David Hubel , Walter Gilbert, Baruj Benacerraf , Bernard Lown, Sheldon Glashow, William Lipscomb, Thomas Weller.</p>

<p>All of them can be verified with the Harvard directory as holding official titles on the Harvard faculty.</p>

<p><a href=“Harvard Web Directory”>Harvard Web Directory;

<p>Note, that the way I am counting people is that a person has to be a currently listed member of the faculty to count. I am not using the metric where a person has to have won the Nobel while working at a particular school in order for that school to count him. If we were to use that metric, all the numbers for all the schools would radically change. For example, Caltech would no longer be able to count David Baltimore, as he won the Nobel while he was on the faculty of MIT. </p>

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<p>I have to disagree with this. You would be right to complain if Becker had left Stanford and Stanford was still counting him. However, as far as I can tell, Gary Becker is STILL at the Hoover institute, so I don’t see what’s wrong with Stanford counting him. Becker holds dual appointments with Stanford (Hoover) and Chicago, so he gets counted for both schools. Plenty of people are dual-counted this way. </p>

<p>Here’s his current Stanford/Hoover website:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/becker.html[/url]”>http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/becker.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Wait a minute now, I think this is rather unfair. The fact is, ALL schools, not just Caltech, became significantly larger since WW2. American higher education in general grew tremendously in the post-war period because of government policy, particularly the GI Bill, as well as the shift of science leadership from Europe to the US during WW2 (because of the devestation of the war, the flight of top European Jewish scientists from Nazi persecution, and the development of large military-related science projects like the Manhattan Project and the Cold War military-industrial complex which were stoked by world events), as well as demographic changes (especially the Baby Boom). </p>

<p>Hence, while I don’t have the data right now, but I strongly suspect that MIT, like Caltech and like most other US schools, was a far smaller school during the prewar days than it is today. </p>

<p>Furthermore, more importantly, your line of reasoning leads to another, more interesting question. You say that (and I agree) Caltech was a smaller school before WW2 than it is today. Yet you also pointed out that 5 out of the 7 Caltech undergrad Nobel Prize winners studied at Caltech before the end of the war. I haven’t checked that fact, but I’ll take your word for it. So then, if that’s really true, then that would that the Caltech undergraduate program has actually become LESS productive after the war on both an absolute and a per-capita basis (because Caltech, like most American schools, got bigger after the war), right? If so, then why is that? I’ve heard Ben Golub remark before that Caltech has actually become a less rigorous school than it was in the past. Might that have something to do with it? </p>

<p>Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to hate on Caltech. In fact, for various personal reasons, I happen to like Caltech a lot. Furthermore, I freely agree that the Caltech undergrad program is still one of the most productive, perhaps the most productive, in the world. But the issues you raised elicit good questions. Is the Caltech undergrad program not as productive as it was in the past glory days, which seem to be during the 20’s-30’s when the undergrad program produced people like Anderson, McMillan, Shockley, & Rainwater? If so, why?</p>

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<p>And then you have to consider that many people win Nobels at advanced ages because there is often a large time gap between significant discovery and the prize.</p>

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<p>I would further point out that as far as Nobels are concerned, Caltech had an extremely fast start relative to all other US schools. For example, by the mid-30’s, the Caltech faculty already boasted 3 Nobel Prize winners (Millikan, Morgan, Anderson). During that time, I believe that no other US school had more Nobel Prize winners on the faculty - not Harvard, not MIT, not Stanford, not Chicago, not Princeton, not anybody. This was during the Caltech “glory days” that I referred to in a previous post. This was before the Manhattan Project, before the Cold War defense buildup, and basically before the US (and consequently, US school) became the science and tech research behemoth that it is today. </p>

<p>It wasn’t until 1944 that the faculty at MIT had won even one Nobel prize winner, and that was at the MIT Radiation Lab (so whether you want to count that as being truly ‘belonging’ to the MIT faculty is up to you). That precipitated a plethora of Nobels won by the MIT Radiation Lab. What that shows is just how much MIT’s science potential was awoken by WW2 and the Cold War. It wasn’t until the 60’s that MIT faculty members won for work that was not associated with the Radiation Lab. </p>

<p>Similarly, Stanford faculty didn’t win its first Nobel until the 1950’s, and didn’t really get on a roll the 70’s-80’s or so. Princeton faculty didn’t start to win until the 1970’s (although obviously some alumni went on to win Nobels, but not as members of the Princeton faculty). Chicago faculty didn’t also really get going until after the war.</p>

<p>The point is to demonstrate that Caltech came very early to the party and was an extremely well established, arguably, the most well established, technical school in the US in the prewar period. It took the war and the postwar defense buildup for the other schools to take their seats at the table. </p>

<p>The point is, I really don’t think it’s fair to look at the performance of MIT or Stanford or Princeton or Chicago or any other school in the prewar period. They were far far different and less prominent technical schools than they are now. MIT in particular, as well as to some extent Princeton and Chicago, are schools whose histories are deeply intertwined with the rise of the military-industrial complex, and Stanford is deeply intertwined with the rise of Silicon Valley (which was itself a byproduct of the military-industrial complex). It is clearly true that Caltech was a better pre-war school than any of these schools, and probably better than any American school. </p>

<p>But that’s the past. The past is not destiny. 70 years ago, Stanford was a weak regional backwater school of little fame and little consequence. 70 years ago, MIT was still largely seen by many as little more than a glorified trade school. That was then.</p>

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<p>Not THAT large of a gap. For those laureates that came out of MIT for undergrad, the majority of them graduated postwar (~late 40’s-70’s). However, for Caltech, the majority graduated prewar. You would expect that any time gap would affect all schools equally. Yet you end up with different results.</p>

<p>What I’m illustrating is that MIT (like most US schools but apparently unlike Caltech) was a far far more prominent tech school post WW2 than prewar, as I discussed in a prior post of mine. Caltech, in contrast, was already an extremely prominent, arguably the most prominent US tech school before the war. </p>

<p>A corollary to that is that it’s not particularly fair to look at the performance of those other schools before the war. The past is the past. The past is not destiny. If the past was destiny, then Caltech would still have the most faculty laureates today of any US school, just like it did in the 20’s-30’s.</p>

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<p>Let’s remember that all I said initially was that you’re still far more likely to bump into a Nobel laureate faculty member here than anywhere else; the number of Nobelists per student is highest here.</p>

<p>But since we’re doing this, I disagree strongly that the glory days of Caltech were solely before the war. The output of physicists in the 60’s and 70’s, when Feynman was here, was just phenomenal. Since physics is widely-acknowledged to be a “late” Nobel – most winners get it quite late in life – most of those guys aren’t due yet; but they will be. I can almost guarantee a wave of undergraduate and grad school alumns winning the physics Nobel in the next decade or so.</p>

<p>One of the things to remember is that Caltech’s sample sizes are tiny, so a smaller number of undergrad postwar Nobelists doesn’t necessarily mean anything when the undergraduate population is so tiny; the law of large numbers hasn’t kicked in yet. It could just be a statistical blip, which another decade will remedy, as I predict above.</p>

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<p>kudos to Caltech (and not CIT).</p>

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<p>OK OK guys…these great insitutions wil continue to win Nobel Prizes…</p>

<p>What I really want to see: Ben win the Nobel Prize</p>

<p>Then, he can brag about it all he wants…</p>

<p>GO Ben! Nobel '06!</p>

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<p>I won a Nobel prize in 2042… but then I had to go back in time and invent the A-Bomb to prevent the Japanese from conquering the world.</p>

<p>Ah well, it will come again in due time…</p>

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<p>Although I’m told that Ben is really smart, he’s a mathematician and it is quite hard to win a Nobel prize in mathematics (they don’t give them out). But hey, I could win one, right?</p>

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<p>The Fields Medal is colloquially known as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics.”</p>

<p>And Nobel prizes take a lot of luck. You have to be working in the right field at the right time.</p>

<p>Furthermore, while Millikan later moved to Caltech, he performed his “oil drop experiment” at Chicago. Arthur Compton was a antebellum Nobel winner at Chicago as well. As for Anderson, yes, he won his Nobel Prize for his cooperation with Millikan on the discovery of the positron at Caltech. That’s the Nobel Prize work conducted at Caltech in the antebellum era. Thomas Hunt Morgan made his Nobel discovery at Columbia and then moved to Caltech. Do old Nobel winners who choose to move to another institution after their famous discovery make it prestigious, even if the research wasn’t done there? Well, perhaps it does - as we see during WWII, many Nobel laureates moved to American universities and boosted the prestige of those. But does the presence of a few Nobel Prizes make an institution extremely prestigious? 3 is an awfully small sample size.</p>

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<p>In my opinion, no matter where and when they won the Nobel, it still counts. If they were at Caltech before the research that won it, I like to think Caltech contributed on their path. If they were at Caltech during OR AFTER the research then that means Caltech has a nobel-winning mind teaching it’s students. The building the research was done in doesn’t deserve any of the credit, so unless you want to make arguments about students who might have contributed towards the professors work, in my opinion, every school the laureate is at from the time they did their research on has equal claim to the prestige of having a Nobel laureate on their faculty.</p>

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<p>Hmm, I might go into economics instead. I hear they give Nobels out like candy there. Errrm… nevermind. Most Nobel prize winning economics only seems obvious after it’s done. Sad, that.</p>

<p>: )
Ben</p>