Tonight I had dinner (sushi) with some long- term friends and a new friend, a professor of mathematics from the Netherlands. As the around-the-dinner-table conversation pro- gressed, he had occasion to tell two stories he knows related to Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prize. I pass both along, for whatever they are worth.
The first has to do with why there is such a thing as the Nobel Prize in the first place. Alfred Nobel made his money by inventing and selling dynamite and the weapons of war. Well, at some point in his life, a rumor began to circulate around Europe that he had died. It wasn't true, but that didn't keep people from commenting on his death as if he had, in fact, really died. As a result, Alfred Nobel got to read his own obituaries." They were not complimentary. He got to read column after column condemning him for contrib- uting greatly to the suffering of mankind. He took this to heart, and placed the lion's share of his considerable fortune in a trust to support the Nobel Prizes, in an attempt to "mitigate" his rep on this planet, and how the planet would remember him. The second story is more charming, and in a way more human. Have you ever wondered why there is not a Nobel Prize for Mathematics? The answer, as it turns out, is remarkably human. In his youth, Alfred Nobel was enamored of a woman. She "preserved her chastity" with him, but he came to find out that all the time she was leaving him at the door with a chaste good-night kiss, she was then going straight into the arms (and the bed) of a fellow university professor of mathematics. The math prof was boinking the bejezuss out of the women that Alfred Nobel chastely loved. The result? There is no Nobel Prize for Mathematics, and never will be one. Isn't it cool when you find out that some of the world's greatest honors are in fact the stuff of soap opera?
