(Bloomberg Opinion) -- This past week marked one of the biggest science geek events of the year: the Ig Nobel Prize awards, showcasing some of the most silly-sounding scholarship. This year’s winners included researchers who examined narcissists’ eyebrows, tested dung knives, and put alligators on helium.
While all that does sound a little ridiculous, it’s actually hard to tell! Even major discoveries can seem a bit absurd at first, especially if phrased inelegantly.
Don’t believe me? Here are 14 real Nobel laureates whose work I’ve described, shall we say, a bit ignobly.
They’ve all had distinguished careers, with many awards and honors.
But when you put their names in the right order, you should be able to identify one sweet success none of them quite got the chance to taste – and that is this week’s answer.
- American MEDICAL pharmacologist who more or less discovered Viagra.
- AUTHOR of plays featuring long English speeches that journey into nightly tragedy.
- AUTHOR who struggled through modern Greek poems.
- Canadian-American CHEMICAL biologist who figured out that a certain protein wasn’t as catalytic as we might have thought.
- Everyman AUTHOR who could have been a Rain King instead.
- German CHEMIST whose third focus was an absolute zero.
- German physical CHEMIST who poured things on surfaces and watched them move around.
- Irish AUTHOR of poems about frogspawn and peat bogs who also re-transcribed old adventure literature.
- Mathematical ECONOMIST who proposed algorithm for achieving divorce-free marriage, which has never been used for that purpose.
- MEDICAL neurologist who figured out why some cows go “mad.”
- Organic CHEMIST who discovered one ring to bind them.
- Organic CHEMIST who used retro synthesizers.
- Pioneering female pharmacologist who used a backwards method to make MEDICINE.
- Taiwanese CHEMIST who crossed beams, but intentionally.
If you manage to claim this week’s crowning achievement -- or if you even make partial progress -- please let us know at skpuzzles@bloomberg.net before midnight New York time on Thursday, September 24.
If you get stuck, there’ll be a hint announced in Bloomberg Opinion Today on Tuesday, September 22. Sign up here.) To be counted in the solver list, please include your full name with your answer.
Programming note: Next week, Conundrums will run on Sunday, September 27 at 8 a.m. Eastern time. If you have opinions about the optimal release day/time for the column, please let us know at skpuzzles@bloomberg.net.
Previously in Kominers’s Conundrums …
We zoomed into the Conundrums classroom, looking to prove that at least two students in a 129-person lecture must know the same number of other attendees. “Knowing” was implied to be a symmetric relation, so if Arthur knows T.J., then T.J. must know Arthur.
With such a large number of people involved, the problem might have sounded daunting – any one of them could know anywhere from 0 to 128 others. And if you started out by trying to construct and check different social graphs by hand, you would’ve gotten frustrated quickly.
The trick was to realize that if there is someone in the room who knows 0 others, then there can’t be anyone who knows 128 – and vice versa. So there are really at most 128 possible distinct numbers of people each student could know.
But with 129 students and only 128 possibilities, there simply have to be (at least) two who know the same number. This is an example of a mathematical fact called the “pigeonhole principle” – if you have more people (or pigeons) than options to assign them to, at least two of them must be assigned the same option.
The Bonus Round
Explore a bizarre non-Euclidean geometry or this hilarious wildlife photography (hat tip: Elizabeth Sibert). Snakes and ladders; weekly kids’ math (hat tip: Ellen Kominers); and new progress on numbers so perfect, yet odd. Editing Wikipedia for fun and profit; one really cool gaming chair. And inquiring minds want to know: Can AI build a better chess?
Sorry for not having stated this explicitly! We received a couple queries on this point.
None of those students know Pepper or Doug, eliminating the possibility that anyone in the room knows 127 or 128 people. And once more, it’s impossible to have one of the remaining students know nobody while the some other knows everyone other than Pepper and Doug.
The basic version of this puzzle is well-known, and I haven't been able to find an original reference. But I first learned it from Lagoon Books's Mind-Bending Classic Logic Puzzles.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. Previously, he was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the inaugural research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.
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