Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics*–but there’s lots of math involved in Nobel Prizes. Word problems….

1. If 7 of us fly to Stockholm on the redeye,
   plot our best distribution onto airplane seats, bearing in mind that
   Amity’s husband Colin has very long legs and neither of Frank’s parents
   should have to
   sit immobilized for too long.
2. Which will be harder and take more time: to find the required
   white-tie-and-tails Nobel outfit in Boston and lug it to Stockholm, or
   to figure our how to take 8 different measurements of my husband and
   then convert them all into metric so that someone in Stockholm can rent the outfit for him?
3. Rank
   these four events in order of probabability: Lightning will strike Mel
   Gibson, Lightning will strike Mel Brooks, Betsy Devine will have
   triplets nine months from now, Frank Wilczek will need to wear
   white-tie-and-tails to some event unrelated to Nobel Prizes.

Show all calculations, and remember, neatness counts.

MIT webcast of his Nobel Prize press conference 56K | 220K | 450K.) Hmmm, I’m afraid that person is Betsy Devine–but what’s with her haircut?

Having eyes in the back of your head might be a good thing–having eyes *on* the back of your head can be pretty embarassing.

My old hometown paper just ran a piece on Frank’s Nobel Prize.
The headline gives you the flavor of the whole thing: “Manchester
Family Proud of Newest Nobel Prize Winner.” Manchester NH has 100,000
people but every one of them knows it as a small town.

In the 1950s. the Manchester Union Leader was run by a right-wing nut* named William Loeb who gained some nationwide notoriety during the 1972 primaries.

My mother–a Rockefeller-type Republican from Massachusetts–refused to
allow “that filthy rag” in our house, which meant we had to look in a
neighbor’s copy to find out which movies were playing. She warned us never to talk to strangers because they might be Union
Leader reporters trying to dig up dirt about my dad. (My dad held various
unpaid offices in the NH Democratic Party and attracted some nasty
attacks from Mr. Loeb.)

In those days, I imagined reporters hung out at playgrounds all over the city, so they could ask unsuspecting children about
their fathers.

Times change. Mr. Loeb left the planet long ago, and the Union Leader,
though still right-wing, shows some admirable attempts at balance. Its
editorials strongly favor George Bush, but the paper’s star
political columnist John DiStaso played a major role in exposing Republican wrongdoing in the NH phone jamming scandal.

And now the paper has kind words to say about some Devines. I just wish my mother were here–she’d be smiling too.

It’s been great getting email and phone calls from old friends. Frank
went out to dinner tonight with some physicists–when he got home he
had 110 new messages. (Mostly not Nigerian viagra offers, because MIT
has a pretty good spam-filter system.)

We’ve heard from former
professors, long-ago babysitters, sixth-grade school friends, plus
several members of the “Princeton Eulers”, a softball team I organized
at the Institute for Advanced Study. And my blog friends have been
generous with their link-love!* Our kids, parents, siblings, etc. are
getting similar deluges of congrats.

If I’d known 15 minutes of
fame would be this much fun, I would have wished harder for it to
arrive. OTOH, if I’d known 15 minutes of fame would be this much work,
I might have decided to hide under the bed.

“[Frank Wilczek] thanked his family and colleagues and said his work
was a ‘vindication of the idea that it is possible to understand nature
precisely.’ He also cast his award in political terms, pinning on a Kerry-Edwards button before posing for cameras.”

Boston Globe, Oct. 6, 2004

[Emphasis–and link to buttons–added by me.]

Here’s my favorite photo from yesterday, taken by Brian Snyder of Reuters as Frank walked out the door for his usual 3-mile walk to MIT.

Can you see the West Highland terrier, down by my knee?

Marianne,
age 16, or 112 in dog years, had the best time of anyone yesterday
morning–her breakfast and morning walk arrived hours early! Getting to
sniff Brian Snyder’s photo equipment was an extra treat.

She was by no means finished sniffing it when he left.

Heh, not like what you might think.

Exhibit A: After Frank gave me a thumbs-up that this morning’s 5:30
phone call was what we both hoped, I ran out to the kitchen to listen
on an extension as a series of very distinguished and impressive Nobel
Committee members congratulated him.

It wasn’t until the second or third Swedish voice (a Lars or a Niels or a Sven, I was losing track) that I
realized–Frank was still totally dripping water from the shower he
climbed out of. So I ran back and grabbed a big bathrobe to drape
around him. Not that he probably noticed, but I felt good about it.

Exhibit B: I’m not used to having people ring the doorbell at 6 a.m.
who turn out to be photographers from Reuters. But Brian was very nice,
and took some good pictures.

Exhibit C: Lame remarks that are fun in retrospect: “Could you let me
park in this parking lot because my husband just won the Nobel Prize
and I’m late for his press conference?”

That’s how I wound up with a huge cardboard special permit with a
handwritten endorsement. No, it didn’t say what you might think,* it
said, “Vendor.”

So this morning the phone woke me up at 5:30 and it was a lady with a
beautiful Swedish accent. Frank was already in the shower, but he got
out and dripped all over the floor while she informed him that he and
his thesis advisor David Gross, and a third physicist named David
Politzer, just won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics!

Awesome! I’m so pleased! Frank Wilczek rulez!