The Nobel prize in Chemistry this year goes to Robert H. Grubbs (Caltech), Richard R. Schrock (MIT), and Yves Chauvin (Institut Francais du Petrole) for the development of metathesis. Massive misspelling of “Caltech” runs amok among the world’s newspapers.
O brave new quantum world!
At least Caltech doesn’t just mean “with” in another language.
I wore my “MIT… because not everyone can go to Caltech” T-shirt at the MIT gym today. 🙂
Those shirts rock.
Personally I like to remind MITers that Caltech has a higher per capita Nobel prize ratio than any other school. If you actually work out the chances, as a alumni of Caltech, of winning a Nobel prize, it is a calculation like this:
15 alumni Nobels (30 total).
Caltech has been around basically 100 years and has about 500 students per class (grad and undergrad) although it hasn’t always been that size. Assume we’re off by a factor of 2 in the total size (zero to current size linearly, which is not even close to correct, but whatever.) Then the chance of winning the prize if you are an alumni is 15 in 250000 or 3 in 50000.
By contrast, MIT has a student body of around 2500 students per class, Harvard has about 4000 students per class. These factors of 5 and 8 in size certainly aren’t made up in the number of Nobel alumni. Especially since MIT and Harvard are both older, although admittedly you should only start counting from when Nobels were handed out.
Does it count that I got a D in OChem from one of this year’s Nobel Prize winners? 😉
Caltech = Calcutta Technical Institute (according to Apu at least)
Doesn’t “D” stand for “done”?