Curiously Curious

This has been a somewhat sad week for science, physics in particular. John Archibald Wheeler passed away on April 13, and a few days later on April 16, Edward Lorenz died.

I first came across Wheeler’s name as a first year undergraduate student while reading James Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, entitled Genius. All I remembered about him from that book (and what most non-physicists might care to remember about him) was that a) he coined the term “black hole” and b) he was Richard Feynman’s Ph.D. advisor.

A wonderful personal tribute to the man can be found here. On that blog, someone kindly posted a link to a series of video interviews about his life and times. Its a wonderful repository of information for anyone curious or just fascinated by the golden age of physics. Other interviews include those of Dyson, Gell-Mann, and Teller.

Edward Lorenz was a name I encountered less than a week ago ! A colleague in Lab, drew my attention to a book, “Nonlinear systems and Chaos” by Steven Strogtaz. I have only managed to go through the first two chapters of the book, in what is my first serious attempt to understand nonlinearity and chaos. Although I had heard of the butterfly effect, I hadn’t connected it to the name Edward Lorenz. During the course of this past week, this oversight has indeed been emended ; by virtue of the book, as well as the sad demise of Edward Lorenz.

There are plenty of videos out there that illustrate nonlinear phenomena, but for me personally, the following was most pedagogically efficacious (and brief):

A discussion came up at lunch today about h-index for chemists. I hadn’t thought about the h-index for some of the leading chemists of our times, or even what the magnitude of the h-index might be. Henry “Frtiz” Schaefer III, of the University of Georgia has compiled a list, ranking the h-index of living chemists. When the list was first published online by Chemistry World in 2007, the Harvard organic chemist E. J. Corey came out tops with an h-index of 133 (which means Corey has published at least 133 papers, each of which have been cited at least 133 times) . A recent update ( March 2008 ) finds fellow Harvard faculty, G. M. Whitesides, has pipped Corey with an h-index of 140 !

A few chemists who work in the general area of electrochemistry and/or electron transfer reactions, are listed below:

Name, h-index, (Rank):

Allen J. Bard, 106, (11)

Harry B. Gray, 97, (16)

Thomas J. Meyer, 91, (34)

Royce W. Murray, 87, (44)

Rudolph A. Marcus, 84, (51)

Jean-Michel Savéant, 81, (57)

R. Mark Wightman, 71, (119)

Fred C. Anson, 68, (152)

Christian Amatore, 54, (389)

Andrew G. Ewing, 51, (463)

The full list can be found here. The highest ranked Indian chemist is C.N.R Rao (74) with an h-index of 76.