Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

The Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics ceremony is upon us once again! With the 2014 winner set to be revealed in Stockholm next week, we at Wolfram got to wondering how many of the past recipients have been Mathematica users.

We found no less than 10 Nobel Prize–winning physicists who personally registered copies of Mathematica. That’s at least one in every eight Physics laureates since 1980! And anecdotal evidence suggests that nearly every Nobel laureate uses Mathematica through their institution’s site license.

Frank Wilczek Wolfgang Ketterle John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Among them are Germany’s Wolfgang Ketterle and American Frank Wilczek. Ketterle was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 for his Bose–Einstein condensation work, and he accepted the award along with fellow physicists Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman. Wilczek, known for his discovery of asymptotic freedom, was selected for the Prize in 2004, along with co-researchers David Gross and Hugh Politzer.

It’s not just in Physics that Mathematica has shone on the Nobel stage. We’ve also had winners in Chemistry and Economics. The case of Economics we’re talking about is none other than famed genius John Forbes Nash. Nash, who was the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind and won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994, has been among our best-known users.

So rest assured we will be watching all of this month’s 2014 winner announcements with interest…

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2 comments

  1. I know that my former classmate Steven Weinberg (Physics 1979) has Mathematica on his computer.

    Reply