IgNobel Slides
The IgNobel prizes have been announced last week. From Wikipedia: “The Ig Nobel Prizes are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten achievements that ‘first make people laugh, and then make them think.’ Organized by the scientific humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.”
This year, Andre Geim was the first IgNobel laureate to receive a Nobel prize. Andre Geim shared the IgNobel with Sir Michael Berry in 2000 for their work on magnetically levitating frogs. He received the Nobel this year, in physics, for “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene“. I do believe that the two prizes are converging somewhat…
For those of you who teach, and whose students crave some comic relief (like mine do), here is a 3-slide show I prepared on this year’s IgNobel. You can download the presentation from Slideshare.
The study on slime molds was published in Science earlier this year with all the hype across the blog networks 🙂