Around early October the scientific community -or at least part of it- starts getting excited about what could be considered the most prestigious award a scientist could ever achieve: The Nobel Prize.
The three categories that interest me the most are: Chemistry, Physics and Literature. I’m not saying I don’t care for the other three (well, maybe the one in economy is way out of my league to grasp) but these three are the ones that always arouse my curiosity. This year laureates have really had me excited! For starters, in chronological order of announcement, Geim and Novoselov seem to be quite younger than the average recipient (52 and 36 years old, respectively). But so is the field for what they got it since the first paper these two scientists from the University of Manchester published on the topic is only about six years old. Discovery of Graphene and most importantly the characterization and understanding of its properties is one of the most promising areas in materials sciences since graphene exhibits very interesting electronic as well as structural behaviors. Nobel prizes are always controversial, but we have to admit that although graphite has been around us for ages, these two England-based Russian scientist have kicked off a promising area of science that will no doubt contribute to further technological developments we can only begin to imagine.
On the other hand, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Heck, Negishi and Suzuki for their work on Pd (palladium) catalyzed coupling reactions. What I liked the most about this prize is that a few years ago I published alongside Dr. David Morales-Morales from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a paper in J. Molecular Cat. A., in which we performed a systematic study of a phosphane-free Heck reaction for a series of Pd catalysts with the general formula [ArFNH]PdCl2 (ArFNH = Fluorinated or polyfluorinated aniline). In this paper theoretical calculations were used to assess the relationship between the substitution pattern in fluorinated anilines upon the catalyst’s eficiency, a sort of small quantum-QSAR. Another thing that got me (and a bunch of other chemists) excited was the fact that this year the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to people working in old fashioned synthetic chemistry, so to speak. Recently a long list of researchers working on the field of BIO-chemistry were awarded the prestigious prize, which comes to no surprise since the development of the Human Genome Project has, and will continue to have, a huge impact in biotechnology. Be that as it may, good for Heck, Suzuki and Negishi and the Pd-catalyzed-carbon-carbon-bond-forming-reactions!
About my initial remark: For reasons I don’t know (I wont subscribe to any of the existing urban-legend-level hypothesis) there is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics, although a lot of mathematicians have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economical Sciences. For mathematicians the Fields Medal would be the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. However, the Fields Medal is only awarded every four years. Four years ago, this captivating character named Grigori “Grisha” Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for solving what the Clay Institute in Massachusetts deemed one of the problems of the millennium: The Poincare Conjecture. What is so noteworthy is that Grisha (diminutive for Grigori in Russian) rejected the medal as well as the million dollars awarded by the Clay Institute for solving it. He also rejected a position at Princeton University. His lack of faith in any institution was also reflected in his work, since he did not publish his solution to Poincare’s conjecture in any peer reviewed journal but instead uploaded it on-line and alerted some notorious mathematicians he had worked with in the past about it. Secluded in his St. Petersburg apartment, this remarkable fourty year old, Rasputin-looking-genius, mathematician keeps rejecting not only all fame, money and glory but human contact altogether. It is said that at some point Sir Isaac Newton did the same thing. I guess great minds do think alike.
