Brushes with fame (science and math edition)?

Question

In a recent post I learned that CNTB has met Lynn Margulis, and emucompboy ran into astronaut Harrison Schmidt (the last man on the moon). They can tell you their stories.

My own favorite brush with fame was taking course in the Philosophy of Mathematics with Alonzo Church. (Of Church-Turing Thesis fame.) It was my last quarter as an undergraduate at UCLA ... and I was thrilled to know that he was teaching there, although in the Philosophy department, not Mathematics.

Anyone else? Eavesdrop on Watson and Crick arguing over a check at a restaurant? Catch Richard Dawkins buying fishsticks at the Safeway? Engage in an angry debate with Stephen Hawking at a physics symposium?

Answer 1

I was on a tour of USC with my students - a handful of seventh graders. Our guide was a friend who is an engineer at JPL. I am in awe of this guy - a real rocket scientist.

We're eating lunch and talking about nothing, when he goes blank staring at another group of people. He just gets up and walks off to this other group. talks to them for a second and comes back BEAMING. It was like he was back in high school and talked to a girl he liked. It was Dr. Olah - Nobel prize winner, organic chemistry etc.

It was neat that my students got to see that my heroes have heroes.

Answer 2

I saw a talk by James Watson a few years ago at the NIH. He made some inappropriate comments about the number of Asians in science. Since more that 25% of the attendees were Asian, I don't need to point out that it didn't go too well.

I also met Nobel prize winner Richard Roberts and had a discussion with him regarding his prize (it was in a graduate class). He snootily told us that he used the prize money to build a smashing croquet lawn at his house.

Answer 3

I've met quite a number of scientists who are famous to other scientists ... but not many of them would be known outside of rather small circles.

For example, Henry Bourne - a member of the National Academy, and perhaps the discoverer of trimeric G-proteins - gave me the finger once upon a time after I told him that concern on the part of universities over the plight of post-docs and graduate students was only so many crocodile tears.

I've also had lunch with Walter Gehring, chatted with Francis Collins, listened to Lutz Birnbaumer and Roger Tsien joke about how they use PNAS, told Richard Axel that one of his experiments was "beautiful", introduced my dad to Eddy De Robertis, e-mailed David Baltimore and Eric Kandel, questioned Anthony Fauci, been brushed off by Stephen O'Brien, listened to Eric Weischaus at a happy hour, and asked Mathew Scott his views of evolution.

They are all famous, in their own ways.

I was recently at Cold Spring Harbor and saw Jim Watson a couple of times, but didn't have the guts to approach him. Two of my roommates there saw a pretty great near brush with fame though ...

There's a model of a strand of DNA outside one of the lecture halls at CSH. Two young women were looking for someone to take their picture with it, just as Watson was walking past. They didn't recognize him but they very nearly asked James Watson to snap the photo of them standing with the 12' foot model of Watson-Crick base pairs.
That's a great story of what almost was, no?

Answer 4

Went to a recent (last spring...March, I think) speech of Ken Miller's at a local community college. Speech was over God, creationism, and evolution. Very interesting. Got to introduce myself afterwards, said I taught my high school students using his text from Prentice Hall (which he smiled at), and asked him the question I've raised (in the biology board) before about fundamentalist students "shutting down" during the evolution unit of class. Very accomodating and approachable person.

Answer 5

I did some work with Prof. Shull at MIT, for which he won a Nobel Prize in Physics. (My contribution was negligible.)